action is critical for women’s empowerment and to bring about a change to women’s
status in society. This can then contribute to a more collective responsibility for unpaid
care work between women, men, community and the state.
All 4Rs are important and can be done simultaneously and not necessarily sequentially as
presented above.
Using the 4R framework, and integrating the inputs of the workshop participants, as well as the
rights espoused by the international and local instruments, the following recommendations are
given to help address the issues in relation to care work:
Recommendations to represent women in care work:
1. Advocate for the recognition of women’s care work. The Commission on Human Rights
(CHR), Philippine Commission on Women (PCW) and other women’s organizations should
altogether build and strengthen awareness on issues related to unpaid care work.
Advocacy initiatives should target the government and the public, especially the men, so
that women’s efforts in performing unpaid care work for their families are recognized and
given value. Efforts should also be conducted to strengthen women’s voice and
representation, especially those living in remote rural communities, so that they can take
part in the advocacy initiatives on issues that affect them.
2. Advocate for girl-child education and equal rights for men and women in communities.
Increasing the literacy rate of women will give them better opportunities to economic
activities and encourage a balance in the sharing of production and care work
responsibilities with male family members.
Recommendations to recognize care work:
3. Collection of data on women who perform unpaid care work should be institutionalized.
This should be further disaggregated into women living in rural and urban communities
due to the disparity in their situation, the latter having more access to technology and
services. Institutionalizing the data collection would require careful planning to ensure
that relevant data in relation to unpaid care work can be captured to aid legislation and
development of social policies that will help ease rural women’s multiple burden. The
Philippine Statistics Authority, Philippine Commission on Women and Commission on
Human Rights have key roles and can collaborate to push this endeavour.
4. Legislators should create and enact laws that will recognize and give value to women’s
unpaid work. Giving value should translate to government programs that will provide
more rights and benefits for these women such as social protection. The government can
also provide rural women more access to basic services, such as health care and
education, to share their multiple burden in performing care work. Laws and policies
should also be created to reduce women’s difficulty and time spent on care work.
Recommendations to reduce care work:
5. Increase rural women’s access to infrastructure and services. The rural women leader
representatives at the workshop particularly identified the following:
• Electricity in their community. This will allow the use of simple electrical tools and
fixtures to help rural women in their care work.
21
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