In 2023, I spent six months trying to measure the care economy in three East African countries. What I found was not just invisible labor. It was invisible growth.
The Measurement Problem
National accounts are built on a fiction: that only market transactions count as economic activity. When a paid nanny cares for a child, that care is counted in GDP. When a mother does the exact same work, it is not. The logic is that the mother's labor is not exchanged for money, and therefore has no market price, and therefore does not exist.
This is not just a feminist critique. It is a methodological error with real consequences. If policymakers cannot see care work, they cannot invest in it. The result is predictable: underfunded health systems, overstretched families, and women who are "economically inactive" by official statistics while working fourteen-hour days.
What the Data Shows
In our study, we used time-use diaries to track 2,400 households across urban, peri-urban, and rural zones. The results were striking:
- Women spent an average of 6.2 hours per day on unpaid care and domestic work.
- Men spent 1.4 hours.
- In rural areas, women spent an additional 2.3 hours on subsistence agriculture and water collection — activities that are technically "productive" in national accounts but rarely captured in practice.
When we imputed market wages for this labor — using local rates for childcare, cooking, cleaning, and eldercare — the value of unpaid care work ranged from 23% to 31% of official GDP in the three countries we studied.
Policy Implications
This is not an abstract accounting issue. When the care economy is invisible, public investment flows away from it. Schools are not built. Healthcare workers are not trained. Water infrastructure is not maintained. And women are systematically excluded from formal labor markets because there is no social infrastructure to absorb the care burden.
The solution is not to nationalize care or eliminate domestic labor. It is to measure it, recognize it, and design policy that supports it. That means paid parental leave, subsidized childcare, public health investment, and social protection systems that do not punish women for the unpaid work they are already doing.
Until we fix the accounting, we will keep making policy for an economy that does not exist — and ignoring the one that does.