Before there was a global economy, there was a mother. Before there was a workforce, there was someone who carried it, delivered it, fed it, washed it, nursed it through fever, held it when it wept and sat with it through homework it could not understand. This now-ready human is then released into a world of work that would measure its output in spreadsheets while never once accounting for the cost of producing it. And in all that time, across all those centuries, the world has never once sent her a salary. This is the story of social reproduction. It is the oldest work humanity has ever known, the most economically essential, and the only profession that has never appeared on a single payslip.
Take a moment, gentle reader, to think about what the global economy actually needs to function. It needs workers. Healthy, fed, educated, emotionally stable human beings who can show up, think, build, trade and produce. Those workers do not arrive ready- made. They are grown. Someone carries them for nine months, endures the physical ordeal of bringing them into the world, and then spends the next two decades preparing them for a world that will demand everything they have. Then those workers enter the economy. And someone still cooks their meals, washes their clothes, manages the household, absorbs their stress after hard days, sits with sick children so they can sleep, and holds the domestic world together so that the professional one can keep moving. That someone, in the overwhelming majority of households globally, is a woman. She is not just producing the labour force. She is maintaining it, around the clock, so that it can keep producing.
Every single day, more than 16 billion hours are devoted to unpaid domestic and care work around the world: cooking, cleaning, caring for children and the elderly, work that is critical to communities and economies functioning, yet overlooked in GDP and national statistics. The International Labour Organisation has done the arithmetic that the global economy refuses to do. Valued at minimum wage, this unpaid care work would constitute 9% of global GDP, amounting to $11 trillion annually. Women perform three times more of it than men. In some economies, the figure is starker still. If women’s unpaid work were given a monetary value, it would exceed 40% of GDP in some countries, more than entire sectors like manufacturing or transport. The foundation upon which the global economy sits is built from women’s uncompensated time. The economy knows this. The economy says nothing.
A fair critic will note here that men do care work too. Fathers cook meals, sit with sick children, carry water and support ageing parents. That is true, and it matters. But truth requires precision. The data does not show a small cultural gap that might explain itself away over time. It shows that women do three times the unpaid care work that men do, every single day, across every region studied, regardless of whether the woman also holds a paid job. And behind the visible labour of a father who feeds a child is often the invisible labour of a mother who noticed the food was finished, planned the menu, found the money, bought the ingredients and made sure the kitchen was stocked. Researchers call this the mental load: the cognitive and emotional management of care that rarely gets shared even when the physical tasks occasionally do. It is the part of care work that never switches off, takes no weekend breaks and has no retirement age. When we speak of the burden falling on women, we mean all of it. The labour, the management, and the worry running underneath both.
According to the ILO’s 2024 statistical brief, unpaid care work prevents 708 million women from participating in the labour market globally. Not 708 million women who chose not to work. 708 million women whose time was already fully accounted for before they could make that choice. And for those who do manage to hold paid employment alongside the unpaid work, research consistently shows they return home to what sociologists call the second shift: a full day’s work in the formal economy followed immediately by a full evening’s work in the home that their partners do not share equally. This is not a domestic arrangement. It is an economic policy by default.
In Africa, the burden lands heavier still, because the infrastructure that might ease it barely exists. Rural women in Ghana and Rwanda spend three to four hours per day simply collecting water and firewood for household use. Across Sub-Saharan Africa, 40 billion hours per year are spent on water collection alone, equivalent to one year’s labour by the entire workforce of South Africa. Women in Sub-Saharan Africa currently spend 16.6% of their entire day on unpaid care work, and projections show that by 2050, that figure will actually increase rather than decrease. Across Ethiopia, Ghana and Tanzania, young women and girls spend as much time on unpaid care as adult women. The burden begins in girlhood, which is why so many girls never finish school, never enter formal employment, and never build economic independence. They are absorbed into the care economy before they are old enough to understand what it costs them
Here in Ghana, the numbers are as local as they are staggering. Research presented at a 2025 forum on unpaid care work estimates that this labour could contribute as much as 30% of Ghana’s GDP, equivalent to approximately $6.87 billion of invisible, uncompensated work sitting nowhere on any national account. But the most devastating portrait of what social reproduction costs a Ghanaian woman is not found in a market. It is found on a farm. Women constitute 52% of Ghana’s agricultural labour force and produce 70% of the country’s food crops. Seven out of every ten plates of food eaten in this country were grown by a woman. Yet Ghanaian men own three times more farms and have larger landholdings, and 89% of Ghanaian women spend ten or more hours per week on domestic activities on top of their farming work, compared to 65% of men who spend between zero and ten hours on the same. She grows the food. She does not own the land. She feeds the nation. She does not appear in the national accounts. And when she comes home from the farm, the second shift is waiting. This is not a story about one woman. It is a story about a system so accustomed to extracting women’s labour for free that it has stopped noticing it is doing so.
So what does a world that decides to take this seriously actually look like? It exists. And it is worth the journey to find it.
Sweden introduced one non-transferable month of parental leave for each parent in 1995, a reform that led to a marked increase in fathers’ take-up and their involvement in childcare. The logic was simple and deliberately so: if you do not use it, you lose it. It cannot be transferred to the mother. Fathers must take it, or the family forfeits it entirely. Just before the introduction of that first reserved month, fathers were using 11% of parental leave days. Today, they account for 25% of all days used. That shift did not happen because Swedish men suddenly became more enlightened. It happened because the policy removed the path of least resistance. Norway followed the same principle, and fathers’ uptake of parental leave in Norway has been as high as 90% since the quota was introduced in the 1990s. Ninety per cent. When the system makes it easy for men to share care, men share care.
The economic consequence for women is direct, documented and remarkable. A study by the Swedish Institute of Labour Market Policy Evaluation found that a mother’s future earnings increase on average 7% for every month the father takes parental leave. Read that carefully. When a man takes his share of the care work, the woman earns more. Not because she suddenly becomes more talented or more ambitious. Because she has more time. The connection between who does the care work and who earns the income is not cultural. It is mathematical. And it is a policy choice, not a natural outcome.
Ghana and Africa are not Scandinavia. The fiscal resources, the institutional history and the political culture are different. But the principle does not change with the latitude. At what point does a country decide that the work of producing and maintaining its entire workforce is worth recognising, supporting and sharing? At what point does a mother’s labour inside the home carry the same moral weight as a father’s labour outside it? At what point does the state stop treating unpaid care as a personal sacrifice and start treating it as the national service that it is? The women of Ghana who cook before dawn, farm through the afternoon heat, collect water before dark and still find time to hold a family together are not failing to participate in the economy. They are the economy’s oldest and most essential workers. They have simply never been paid for it. That is not a coincidence. It is a choice. And like all choices, it can be made differently.
Sweety Aborchie writes on Women, Power and Politics for myjoyonline.com.
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