We acknowledge the unceded sovereign lands of Australia’s First Peoples and recognise the ongoing impacts of colonisation. We write in the spirit of the Uluru Statement from the Heart, and with deep respect for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities whose knowledge systems and relational economies have always centred care.

She runs a small daycare centre in Addis Ababa. She has done so for almost a decade — navigating rising rents, inconsistent demand, and a regulatory environment that  often fails to address the issues that critically impact her business. Without her, a mother nearby could not go to work. So we learned her story quietly, through in-depth interviews, and we tell it here not as a cautionary tale, but as an indictment of systems that depend on women like her while refusing to support them.

This is a blog about women and work. But it is not about women’s individual motivation, confidence, or resilience, though there is already an abundance of such content available. It is about the structures that govern women’s work: the care economy, the workforce of women enabling gender equality programmes, the gap between what people know and what institutions allow them to do. It draws on field experience from Includovate’s research across Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia — work conducted in Ethiopia, Kenya, Nigeria, Zambia, and across cotton-farming communities spanning six countries — and on the broader scholarly evidence that gives that work its meaning.

The argument is simple: women’s paid work is everywhere propped up by invisible infrastructure — childcare, field facilitation, gender training — and that infrastructure is everywhere under-resourced, under-measured, and under-theorised. We cannot close gender gaps in economic participation without first asking who is doing the work of closing them, and what it costs her.

1. The care economy is load-bearing

Key foundational research has established the relationship between women’s paid work and unpaid care. Globally, women perform approximately three times more unpaid care and domestic work than men. This imbalance does not diminish as economies develop; in many contexts, it intensifies as women enter formal employment while care responsibilities remain largely unchanged. The solution proposed by international development institutions has largely been to treat childcare as a market problem — solvable through private sector provision, consumer choice, and light-touch regulation.

Our research in Addis Ababa tells a different story. Private daycare centre owners are not marginal players in a supplementary service industry. They are the load-bearing infrastructure of women’s labour force participation in one of Africa’s fastest-growing urban economies. When a mother can drop her child at a trusted centre in the morning, she can attend training, take a client meeting, or hold down a shift (or a business). When one is not available, the other becomes much more difficult. The logic is brutally simple, and the policy response remains inadequate.

Through our case study and stakeholder webinar work, we found that daycare centre owners in Addis Ababa face a consistent cluster of structural barriers: financial volatility driven by fluctuating demand and rising urban costs; near-total exclusion from formal financing and credit; lack of permanent premises; and a regulatory environment that is simultaneously prescriptive about quality standards and silent about economic support. Government maternity and paternity leave protections exist on paper, but they apply almost exclusively to formal sector workers — while the majority of Ethiopian women work informally. The women most in need of childcare support are precisely those the policy does not reach.

Critically, the barriers are not only material. Social norms around maternal care remain powerful arbiters of paid and unpaid work. Our webinar discussions surfaced strong community perceptions favouring maternal care as the safest form of childcare. Trust in daycare centres is low, and this distrust disproportionately affects centres serving low-income urban neighbourhoods where traditional communal care networks have eroded fastest through urbanisation. Daycare owners, who themselves are often women and parents, are trying to run businesses against a cultural headwind, without a policy tailwind.

This is not a problem that individual entrepreneurship can solve. It is a problem that requires reframing childcare as social infrastructure — as essential to a functioning urban economy as roads or electricity — and funding it accordingly [Read more here and here]. Feminist political economists have made this argument for decades [Read more here and here]. The evidence from Addis Ababa makes it again, in concrete and urgent terms.

2. The women enabling gender equality programmes are often the least supported within them

Better Cotton is the world’s largest cotton sustainability programme, operating across 23 countries and reaching over 2.5 million farmers. Its field-level programmes are delivered by a network of more than 5,000 field staff. Of those, 13% are women.

Those women — the Producer Unit Managers and Field Facilitators who convene learning groups, deliver training, build relationships with farming communities, and collect the data that makes programmes accountable — are the connective tissue of one of the most ambitious agricultural sustainability efforts on the planet. They are the people who, when a programme wants to reach women farmers, have the capacity and interest to actually reach them. Research consistently shows that women agricultural extension workers are more effective at engaging women farmers, who otherwise remain outside the reach of male-dominated extension services.

And yet, until 2022, no one had formally asked these women what they needed, what they experienced, or what they thought could be better. Better Cotton’s own Request for Proposals that year acknowledged this directly: the assessment of women field staff needs and baseline empowerment was described as a necessary first step toward understanding a population the programme had never systematically studied. The target was to cover approximately 100–120 of the 550 or so active women field staff globally, representing around 20% of the population. That this was just codified in 2022 underscores how recently the full visibility of this data has been specifically incorporated. 

This is a structural pattern, not an organisational oversight. The literature on agricultural extension is replete with evidence that women extension workers face compounding barriers: restricted mobility, safety risks associated with field travel, exclusion from informal professional networks, and evaluation systems that measure outputs rather than the relational labour that makes women farmers’ participation possible [Read more here and here]. When development organisations set targets to increase the proportion of women in field roles — as Better Cotton has done — without first understanding what those women currently experience, they risk designing incentives for recruitment without addressing retention.

Empowerment cannot be an aspiration for the farmers a programme reaches if it is not also a condition of employment for the people doing the reaching.

3. Knowing is not enough: the knowledge–practice gap in gender equality work

Gender equality training has become a standard component of international development programmes. Capacity building sessions, knowledge, attitude, and practice (KAP) surveys, and Gender Equality and Social Inclusion (GESI) frameworks are now routine features of project design. The question that receives far less attention is: does any of it stick?

Includovate’s GESI capacity building work with WorldFish’s FASA project — operating across Kenya, Nigeria, and Zambia in the aquaculture sector — gives us some unusually granular data on this question. In 2024, we delivered 15 training sessions across three countries and administered pre- and post-training KAP surveys to 152 participants at baseline and 71 at follow-up.

The headline results are encouraging. After training, knowledge of the difference between sex and gender reached 100% among both women and men in Kenya and Nigeria. In Zambia, the percentage of women who acknowledged that women struggle more than men to access financial services increased from 57% to 100% — a dramatic shift in awareness. Attitudes towards women’s leadership improved across all three countries, with near-unanimous post-training agreement that women are capable of being community leaders.

But the more important finding sits in the practice data. Despite strong gains in knowledge and attitude, the practice of actively supporting women who face gender-based violence remained low across all three countries. In Nigeria, only 24% of women participants reported having spent time helping women in the project to access fish feed information despite this activity reflecting a concrete, practical form of support that falls well within their job descriptions. The belief that gender analysis should be left to specialists remained stubbornly high, particularly among women in Nigeria (53% post-training) and men in Zambia (33% post-training).

This knowledge–practice gap is not a mystery. It is a predictable consequence of training interventions that occur inside institutional environments that show little evolution themselves. A researcher or extension worker can leave a workshop newly convinced that gender analysis is a collective responsibility and then return to an organisation that has insufficient systems for acting on that conviction, no time allocated to it, and no accountability mechanism tied to it. The gap between knowing and doing is not filled by more training; it is filled by institutional change (e.g., revised job descriptions, gender-responsive monitoring systems, leadership accountability, and resources).

There is also something worth naming here about who carries the burden of gender equality work within organisations. Across our training cohorts, women were consistently more likely than men to mentor as many women as men (78% of women vs. 76% of men in Kenya; 69% vs. 54% in Nigeria) and to develop gender-sensitive indicators (63% of women vs. 50% of men in Kenya). The invisible labour of gender equality — the mentoring, the relationship-building, the extra mile walked to include a woman farmer — falls disproportionately on women, who are often already managing heavier workloads. This is not empowerment. It is redistribution of unpaid labour within the paid sector.

4. What feminist research practice actually looks like

These are not comfortable findings to generate. Conducting research with women who are simultaneously agents, workers, and subjects of development programmes requires navigating the very real tensions between organisational interests and individual candour, between the efficiency demands of deliverable timelines and the slower rhythms of trust-building, and between what institutions want to hear and what the data actually says.

Shifting to in-person interviews when online participation felt unsafe, designing KAP surveys that disaggregate by gender from the first data point rather than the last, submitting to ethical clearance before entering a community rather than after, these are the minimum conditions for research that treats participants as subjects of knowledge rather than objects of it. None of these are exceptional practices. They are the minimum conditions for research that centres participant dignity and produces usable findings. But they are frequently traded away in contexts where speed, cost, and donor reporting requirements dominate. Feminist research methodology, with its emphasis on reflexivity, participant safety, positionality, and the politics of knowledge production, is not an academic luxury. It is a practical requirement for generating evidence that is credible and offers fertile pathways forward [Read more on feminist methodologies here, here and here].

One of the clearest lessons from this work is that the people most likely to be studied by development research are the people least likely to be consulted in its design. Women daycare centre owners in Addis Ababa, women field facilitators in cotton farming programmes, and women aquaculture workers in Zambia are the subjects of policy papers, evaluation frameworks, and empowerment indices. They are rarely the ones setting the research questions. Closing that gap is not simply an ethical imperative. It is also how you get better data.

A call to the field: make the invisible visible

Three fields of evidence, four countries, one consistent pattern: the women who enable women’s economic participation — whether as childcare providers, field facilitators, or gender equality trainers — are doing work that is structurally necessary and systematically overlooked. They are counted in programme outputs but not in policy budgets. They are targeted for empowerment without being asked what empowerment means to them. They are trained without being institutionally supported to act on what the training teaches.

What would it mean to take this seriously?

It would mean treating childcare as public infrastructure, with corresponding public investment, not as a private market correction or a corporate social responsibility footnote. It would mean designing gender equality programmes that measure the empowerment of the women delivering them, not only the women they serve. It would mean building accountability mechanisms into gender training that go beyond knowledge surveys and ask who changed what in their institution, and what support they had to do so. And it would mean funding the kind of slow, trust-based, participant-centred research that generates findings worth acting on.

For AWGSA members — researchers, educators, activists, and practitioners — working at the intersection of gender studies and institutional change, there is also a specific invitation here. The knowledge being generated in these field settings is rich, theoretically significant, and often unpublished. The women doing this work are producing insights about care economies, institutional gender norms, and the limits of empowerment frameworks that deserve to be in conversation with the scholarship being produced in Australian universities. That conversation is not happening at the scale it should be.

It starts with asking the question: who is caring for the women who enable women to work?

And it continues only when we are prepared to change the answer.

About the authors

Melissa Langworthy is a development economist and Research Director at Includovate, specialising in women’s economic empowerment, care economies, and intersectional evaluation methods.

Abiyot Negera studied Indigenous Studies and is a researcher at Includovate based in Ethiopia, with expertise in gender and unpaid care work in East African contexts.

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Photo Credits

Photos used in this article are from Wikimedia Commons and are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 (CC BY-SA 2.0).

• Afar Women, Ethiopia — Photo by Rod Waddington, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0. View photo and license
• Tigrayan Women, Ethiopia — Photo by Rod Waddington, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0. View photo and license
• Wolayta Women, Ethiopia — Photo by Rod Waddington, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0. View photo and license
• Rural Scene with Women, Near Teka Tesfai, Ethiopia — Photo by Adam Jones, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0. View photo and license

The photographs are used for illustrative purposes and do not necessarily depict participants, communities, or projects discussed in the article.