AS Maria Tarehwa (not her real name) ends a call with her young sister, she shrugs her shoulders and slumps on the hospital bench next to her three-year-old daughter Tadiwa who fractured her hip bone after a fall from a tree.
Tarehwa had just been informed that the stock she had bought for her market stall had finished and there was no one to send to restock for her.
Since Tadiwa’s hospital admission a week ago, Tarehwa has been by her bedside tending to her, ensuring she is fed, bathed, dressed and consoled when she throws one of her tantrums.
She narrates how difficult it will be for her to boost her selling business when she leaves hospital which the doctor had advised, could be after two more weeks.
Like many mothers with ailing children below the age of five, Tarehwa has to be with her child in hospital till she is discharged.
Most hospitals only allow women to assist the admitted children.
This means women have to drop everything to tend to their ill children, meaning if a child spends more time in hospital, the mother has to be by their side.
Women like Tarehwa lose opportunities and time caring for their sick children, a duty expected of them by society.
Fending for a sick child is one of the many care duties women undertake in the house.
Unpaid care work has been defined as all activities that go towards caring for a household such as cooking, cleaning, collecting water and firewood, caring for the ill, elderly and children for no pay.
Unpaid care work also includes voluntary community work.
According to African culture, women are the ones expected to engage in all the care work without input from men.
In all cases, unpaid care work is invisible, not valued, takes time and energy, not considered in policy and decision-making.
As a result of unpaid care work, women and girls tend to have more responsibilities and cannot do any ‘productive work’.
In the Shona tradition, there are ways of recognising, valuing and appreciating women for care work, for example, if a daughter-in-law takes care of her sick mother-in-law, her husband’s family is expected to give her a token of appreciation, usually a cow.
When a young woman is being married off, the women (the mother, aunts and sisters) who played a crucial part in her upbringing are ususally given tokens of appreciation.
The importance of tackling challenges associated with unpaid domestic care work has been acknowledged in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development through Objective 5.4 which states that there is need to recognise and value unpaid care and domestic work through the provision of public services, infrastructure and social protection policies as well as the promotion of shared responsibility within the household and the family as national priority.
Women’s Rights advocate and lawyer Kudzai Gandiwa said it is time for society to put a value on domestic care work.
“We find that care work focuses on all work done to maintain society, communities and households and this includes looking after children, the sick, day-to-day cleaning of the house, laundry, fetching water, fetching firewood and cooking, both in urban and rural areas,” she said.
“It is clear that this is a heavy load on women which takes a considerable amount of time, particularly for poor women and girls and this hinders them from participating in other economic, social and political spheres of life.”
Gandiwa said there is need for care and domestic work to be recognised as an economic and development issue.
“There is need to ensure that we recognise, reduce and redistribute unpaid care and domestic work in the households between both genders to lighten the burden of women and also give them space and time to fully participate in other institutions of the society,” she said.
“Efforts should be made to lobby Government to recognise unpaid care work as an economic, development and policy issue.”
The major drawback in recognising care work, according to Gandiwa, has been the effort to make it visible because it is not recognised and rewarded.
She said domestic care work is often seen as part of the day-to-day lived realities, as such, some men, private sector and Government see this as a private matter.
“Society even has negative labels for women who do not do domestic care work and they are considered as social misfits, an anomaly which needs to be corrected from here on,” she said.