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On the Ground
Explore our work with partners, globally and locally, to tackle social and economic injustice using a human rights lens.
Strengthening Advocacy on the Human Right to Care during GRADE's Regional Workshop in Mexico City
Between 9 and 12 August, in Mexico City, we participated in the regional workshop "Building care systems from the territories in Latin America and the Caribbean: Evidence from the program: Initiatives to strengthen care policies in Latin America and the Caribbean," organised by GRADE Perú with the support of IDRC, UNRISD, Ford Foundation and the Global Alliance for Care.
The workshop was part of a broader initiative that began in 2023 with the creation of the Collaborative Action-Research Fund for Latin America and the Caribbean on Innovations in Public Policies for the Care Economy. This Fund seeks to generate rigorous evidence on innovative care policies across the region, foster partnerships between researchers and policymakers, and highlight the central role of care in achieving gender equality and sustainable development. Over two rounds of calls, the Fund has supported ten projects in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Peru, the Dominican Republic, and Uruguay. These initiatives explore diverse approaches to strengthening care, from community-led services and cultural adequacy in policy design to the redistribution of care responsibilities and improvements in working conditions for caregivers.
The workshop in Mexico City provided a space to present findings from these projects, exchange experiences across territories, and build common strategies for transforming care systems.
Over several days, researchers, feminist organisations, unions, and government representatives from across the region engaged in collective learning sessions, dialogues, and field visits to exchange evidence and strategies for advancing comprehensive care systems rooted in equality and sustainability. They discussed how to recognise, reduce, redistribute, and reward care work while ensuring care workers' representation in decision-making spaces.
The gathering, held in the context of the XVI Regional Conference on Women of Latin America and the Caribbean, gave the theme of care additional visibility within broader feminist and intergovernmental debates.
Our Programme Officer on Public Services and Care, Valentina Contreras Orrego, was active throughout the sessions. As part of the program's third pillar (knowledge dissemination and advocacy), she presented the project "Expansion of the human right to care and support", where she shared our communications and advocacy strategy aimed at positioning care and support as a human right and a public good in both regional and global agendas. This includes highlighting this framing in a range of multilateral processes, such as the upcoming COP30 in Brazil, G20 in South Africa, and the Second World Summit for Social Development in Qatar, as well as in other UN spaces such as the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (CESCR) review on Chile and Colombia, among others.
In addition to our presentation, we led a participatory workshop encompassing the other projects in the program. This workshop focused on developing collective messages and identifying key audiences to advance advocacy on the human right to care. This interactive space allowed participants to co-create narratives, strengthen alliances, and better connect the evidence generated by local projects with broader political processes.
Through these contributions, we reinforced our commitment to articulating feminist, human rights–based approaches to care, highlighting the urgency of redistributing care responsibilities, ensuring just employment conditions for care workers, and expanding public provision and financing for care systems.
The exchange in Mexico City marked a crucial step in building a shared regional agenda and connecting diverse movements—feminist, environmental, union, and economic movements, among others—towards the recognition and treatment of care as a cornerstone of the right to an adequate standard of living and all economic, social, and cultural rights in general.
