On 23rd July, we convened over 70 of our regional partner representatives and community members for the first National Convening of our Coalition on Unpaid Care Work.
At the convening, we formed the National Committee for the coalition – a 12-member group made up of representatives from each of the regional partner organisations that WMC has been working on “The Care Project: Addressing Unpaid Care Work in Sri Lanka”. The 12 organisations are:
Each represented district will form district-level committees so as to establish smaller sub-national level coalitions.
Globally, unpaid care work is now recognised as an important area of focus regarding gender equality and socioeconomic development. The Sustainable Development Goals, agreed on across the world in 2015 with a deadline for achievement in 2030, includes unpaid care in Goal number 5. Sri Lanka has been relatively slow in integrating the issue of unpaid care work into the country’s socio-economic development agenda.
Sri Lankan women shoulder a large majority of unpaid care work, unfairly and disproportionately. The time-use survey (2025) conducted by WMC showed an average of 8.2 hours spent by women on unpaid care work while men only spent 5.2 hours on the same tasks and work. This gendered disparity narrows the opportunities that women have to participate in the paid workforce as well as participate in key decision-making spaces, or even to take up other activities that are of interest to them. Current national policies pay little or no attention to this extremely gendered division of labour and its impact on the lives of millions of women in the country.
The goals of this Coalition are thus two fold:
The Coalition will focus on the 5Rs of unpaid care work, recognizing, reducing, redistributing and responding to unpaid care work responsibilities of women and girls and increasing the representation of women and girls in decision making processes to reduce the disproportionate burden of care responsibilities. It will aim at raising awareness in communities on how truly gendered the sexual division of labour is with regard to unpaid care work, as well as the negative effects this unfair burden has on the wellbeing of women in the community, from limiting opportunities for women to join the workforce to participating in decision-making roles and spaces. These constraints in effect, can push women to being economically dependent on men. The Coalition’s work will contribute to shifting the social norms that uphold such unfair division of labour and economic dependency.
The work of the Coalition goes beyond awareness raising. To meet the second goal of the Coalition, it will advocate for policy changes, at the community level andr at national level. To address the policy gap in Sri Lanka a comprehensive advocacy effort is needed to recognise the economic value of unpaid care work, to enable representation of unpaid care givers, and to reduce and redistribute unpaid care work . This expands care beyond the formal care economy and introduces policy to ease the burden of unpaid care work on women so they are better able to make choices and pursue opportunities independently. This is in line with WMC’s work to frame the issue of recognizing unpaid care work as a women’s rights issue through which women‘s labour is valued, their rights realised, and their decision-making power expanded in our awareness raising and advocacy work as well in a formal policy.
The ultimate vision of the National Coalition on Unpaid Care Work is clear: “A just and equitable society that recognises the social and economic value of unpaid care work and ensures that care work is redistributed equally among all individuals.”
As set out in its Mission the Coalition plans to reach these goals by “working together to build a strong, socially, economically, and politically empowered coalition representing all sectors in policy making, planning, and paid work by recognizing unpaid care work, reducing the burden of such work on women and by redistributing care work equally within the family.”