Plans to develop a national unpaid care and domestic work policy by the government is underway according to the State Department of Gender in the Ministry of Public Service.
The ministry said the plan has been on the pipeline for a while now. The policy aims to empower women, especially those in the childcare sector.
Miriam Mueni, an official from the State Department of Gender, said it is time to break down discriminatory societal norms and recognize the invaluable contributions of women in childcare.
The policy seeks to put in place a framework to compensate women in childcare whose earnings don’t reflect their heavy workload.
This was revealed last week during the Women In Childcare Forum 2023 in Nairobi in an event organized by Uthabiti Africa an organisation looking to enhance quality early childhood care in Kenya and Africa.
This comes at a time where research shows that women spend up to 11.1 hours a day on domestic work while men spent only 2.9 hours per day according to a study done by Oxfam Kenya in 2019.
For this reason, women contribute less to the economy in terms of time, while women doing domestic work do not get sufficient wages.
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