On the occasion of October 29, the first International Day of Care, the resident coordinator of the United Nations in Bosnia and Herzegovina, dr. Ingrid Macdonald and the representative of UN Women in BiH, Jo-Anne Bishop addressed the public with a joint author’s text.
Who cares about caring?
When women stay at home, take care of family and the elderly, when they decide to take a break or even stop their career due to family obligations, the reason is often to care for others. This type of work involves housework, caring for children, the elderly and people with disabilities, and very often remains invisible, undervalued and underpaid if it is done professionally. At the same time, many women in BiH perform these jobs without any compensation.
Bosnia and Herzegovina has the highest percentage of inactive women on the labor market in Europe. According to the Labor Force Survey from 2022, of the total number of employees in BiH, only 36.8% of women are employed. Women cite unpaid care work as one of the main reasons why they do not look for work, do not start their own businesses, and are forced to work part-time or slow down their professional development and training.
On average, women in Bosnia and Herzegovina spend six hours a day on unpaid care work. In reality, this means that they perform two jobs, unpaid and paid. These are data from the Baseline Study on the Economy of Care, the first comprehensive study on this topic in BiH, conducted by the Economic Institute Sarajevo and UN Women BiH. The price that both women and society pay for this volume of work in the field of caring for others is high. But for women, the biggest price is precisely the unrealized potential to participate and occupy leadership positions in the economy, politics and society as a whole.
A more even distribution of work in the field of care
The public, civil society and the private sector in BiH began to recognize the need to solve the uneven burden of care. Due to the accelerated shrinking of the labor market due to emigration, companies have begun to encourage fairer and stronger maternity leave policies, encouraging more men to take paternity leave and introducing more flexible working conditions. Some companies, such as Violeta from Široki Brijeg and GS TMT from Travnik, open kindergartens and institutions for the care of older family members for their employees.
Civil society organizations respond to the needs in this area through more intensive advocacy and lobbying for policy changes, but also through the direct provision of care services in several areas, including home care services for the elderly. And the authorities have also initiated important measures. Policies have been introduced to legally recognize parents of children or people with disabilities as full-time carers, enabling them to receive benefits for the care they provide, and new types of childcare benefits have been introduced.
However, these efforts need to be expanded. Recognizing, reducing and redistributing unpaid care work requires a systemic and multisectoral response from social protection, health, employment, education, economic development, as well as the private sector, civil society, financial institutions and donors. The transformation of the care economy is one of the key areas for achieving gender equality and inclusive growth, as well as achieving the goals of the 2030 Agenda.
A systemic and holistic investment in the care economy can enable more women to be active in the labor market, but it can also create jobs. In BiH, the formal care economy accounts for about 120,000 jobs or approximately 15% of total employment (compared to an average of 17% in other European countries). This includes employees in the education and health sectors, providers of institutional care and social work services in both the private and public sectors. Increased demands for care require a larger workforce. For example, according to data from 2020, to take care of around 6,600 children who are not enrolled in preschool institutions in Bosnia and Herzegovina, it would be necessary to employ an additional 1,104 employees, of which 1,035 would be women. New employment in the preschool education sector would have an additional knock-on effect on the wider economy.
