BOGOTÁ, Colombia — One day in the distant future, caregiving could be as celebrated as carrying a football into an end zone. Rather than toil in the shadows, people who juggle children and aging parents might be applauded for their skills — or stopped on the street by admirers. Family caregivers could get paid for the hours they put in minding the young, the sick, the disabled and the old. Men would be as proud as women to care for their children. Governments would fund more services to relieve at-home caregiving, recognizing its physical and psychological toll. And, while we’re dreaming, women, with increased options to work outside of uncompensated caregiving, could wield as much political and economic power as men.
Predicting this future today is, unfortunately, more the stuff of speculative fiction than data-driven reality. So for now, consider a small experiment hatched in Ciudad Bolívar, the second-poorest district of Colombia’s capital city, where settlements of makeshift houses sprawl up a steep mountainside, emblazoned with colorful street murals. This district has long been a hotbed of political resistance, home to diverse Indigenous peoples as well as Venezuelan refugees. Women here suffer the capital’s highest rates of domestic abuse and sexual violence. Until 2018, when the city put up an electric cable-car line to connect residents to the public bus system, the only links from Ciudad Bolívar to the city center were dangerous, dizzying roads and uneven footpaths.
Since 2020, it has become the site of Bogotá’s first manzana del cuidado, or “care block,” in a city where caregivers — mostly women, mostly poor — ordinarily labor in obscurity without compensation or formal recognition. More than 30 percent of Bogotá’s female population, some 1.2 million women, provide unpaid care full time, some for as much as 10 hours a day. Most lack formal education beyond some years of high school, and the city estimates that 1 of every 5 of these women has a diagnosed illness, ranging from arthritis from long hours spent hand-washing clothes to sexually transmitted diseases and untreated cancers. And many of them, says Nathalia Poveda, who manages the Manitas care block in Ciudad Bolívar, don’t recognize that when their husbands hit them, it is domestic abuse.
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A care block is a modest attempt to shift the way caregivers are viewed and supported, and the way they view themselves. It’s a community-scale solution — something that’s needed if poor women are to benefit from global progress in gender equality. In Ciudad Bolívar, women can drop off dirty clothes and bedding each week to a city-funded laundromat. Demand is so high in the district, and given only four washing machines and dryers, the women have to rotate out of using the program every three months. A community center offers free courses to help women earn high school diplomas and practice yoga while city employees mind the children, elderly or people with disabilities in their care. Caregivers and their spouses can learn to use a computer or cellphone and get STD testing, psychological counseling and legal aid — all under one roof. In the same building, a child can get a strep test and his mom can get a Pap smear, rather than having to shuffle to clinics around the city.
Follow this authorBina Venkataraman's opinionsThis isn’t rocket science, but it is innovation. “We need to care for the people who care for us,” says Diana Rodríguez Franco, Bogotá’s secretary for women’s affairs, who came up with the idea. The city now has 20 care blocks, as well as a program to send relief caregivers directly to people’s homes. The city funds the program with an annual budget of $800,000, and it has attracted grants from global organizations for pilot projects such as caregiving classes for men.
I spoke with several women using services at various care blocks in the city. “It gives me a breath, a break,” said Lisbeth Diaz, who was taking a class that would certify her skills as a caregiver at the Manitas care block in Ciudad Bolívar. The idea behind certification, said Poveda, is to help women recognize that the work they do in the home is valuable.
“You have to take care of yourself to take care of everyone else,” said Sandra Quevedo, who was glad to learn yoga, lifting her chin and chest with pride as she spoke. At a care block within a high-altitude ecological park called Entrenubes, a group of middle-aged women in a program called Las Mujeres Que Reverdecen — “the women who regreen” — giggled and flexed their muscles when I asked what it was like to get paid to learn to plant trees and care for city parks part time. One woman quietly wept when I asked about her experience at the care block.
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The manzanas are one of several initiatives that Bogotá’s first female and openly gay mayor, Claudia López, has launched to try to shift the balance of power between men and women in a culture long plagued by machismo. The López government also brought in an all-electric fleet of city buses, called La Rolita, and has been hiring and training women to drive and maintain them.
“There’s been huge pushback,” says Rodríguez Franco, noting that the city was sued in 2021 by a man who objected to the care blocks’ focus on women. (La Rolita also inspired a lawsuit.) But Rodríguez Franco is heartened to see some men now coming to the care blocks with their female partners to finish high school or to learn to use computers. Of the 849 people who earned high school diplomas at care blocks in 2022 and 2023, only 21 were men, but boys and men account for more than a quarter of the 406,000 people who have benefited from direct services, including day care.
International development experts have long argued that, along with fostering social progress, educating girls and women and putting more income in their hands can break cycles of intergenerational poverty and moderate population growth. Helping caregivers finish school and find jobs has been an often overlooked but critical piece of this puzzle.
In recent decades, Colombia has made strides toward recognizing the rights of women — especially caregivers. In 2010, it became the first country to require that women’s contributions to the care economy be documented. But Colombia is not Iceland, where men are often seen on the playgrounds and picking up and dropping off children at school. Iceland’s national policies are one reason it has consistently ranked highest among nations in the World Economic Forum’s gender parity index. The government there heavily subsidizes high-quality child care for all families. And Icelandic law gives each parent the right to six months of paid leave when a child is born — and one parent cannot use all the leave. “The use-it-or-lose-it concept is what mattered,” Eliza Reid, Iceland’s first lady, told me recently. “Men are taking part in the lives of children from an early age.”
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It’s easy to imagine this playbook working in the United States and other wealthy countries, if more of them could summon the political will.
But most of the world’s caregivers do not live in places where such policies will soon pass — and, in any case, it’s not clear how much these policies would help poor women in the short run. Entrenched poverty, cultural norms and lack of education keep women out of the workforce and in caregiving roles. Bogotá has had trouble finding women to fill vacant city positions.
Much change is needed to lift the burden on caregivers worldwide and to give women greater access to education and jobs. As political leaders in rich nations debate policies that can put more women into the halls of power, Bogotá’s efforts are a reminder that the world’s poorest caregivers also need innovative measures — if we are one day to inhabit a world in which the average woman’s economic and political power is equal to that of the average man.
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