Latin America’s care revolution
Countries across the region are betting big on building a ‘care society’
Lire cet article en français:
Since the Covid-19 pandemic, countries across Latin America and the Caribbean have been making significant strides when it comes to re-centering, valuing and supporting care. Caregiver-friendly urban innovation, grassroots community initiatives, bold policy commitments, and shifts in economic calculations are reshaping the place of care in many of these societies, providing scalable models for other regions to replicate.
In Bogotá’s “Manzanas del Cuidado”, carers come in for the homemade breakfast, to exercise, file their taxes, or simply for a break and a chat. While she works on the script for a play her and other local mothers are putting on, Natalia Moreno’s elderly mum is over at the cycling session and her son is taking an art class.
There are twenty-five of these ‘Care Apples’ (also referred to as ‘Care Blocs’) in the Colombian capital, with the city planning to reach 45 by 2035. These free public facilities are designed for unpaid caregivers to access a range of activities, services and training programs while the people they care for are attended by staff. Mobile units are dispatched to reach those unable to leave their homes.
Though beneficiaries are primarily women – who in Latin America spend about three times as many hours on unpaid care work as men – the Manzanas also have a “School of Care for Men” as part of their educational component. Practical courses teach men a range of care tasks, and theoretical ones work to dispel the myth that only women can innately care.
Launched in 2020 under the leadership of Diana Rodriguez Franco, the Secretary for Women in then-Bogotá mayor Claudia Lopez’s office, the initiative targets the city’s 1.2 million women who spend their days informally caring for others. According to Colombia’s National Statistics Department, 90% of them are very-low-income, 20% have a chronic illness, and 33% report “never having any free time”1. That means no time to go to the doctor, work out, or see friends. Most of them also never complete high school.
A region-wide trend
The ‘Manzanas del Cuidado’ initiative is part of Bogotá’s participatory care system, which coordinates care provision to the city’s households between the state, the district, the private sector and civil society. It’s far from an outlier: in the last few years, cities like Buenos Aires, Santiago, Monterrey, Quito, Panama City and others have set up their own innovative local frameworks to support caregivers.
In Brazil, Belém’s Municipal Care Policy supports the ‘Ver-o-Cuidado’ project, through which public officials and civil society leaders are trained in care policy design and advocacy. Hundreds of paid and unpaid female caregivers have also received guidance to better understand their rights, defend the value of their work, and demand better care policies. The training has since been expanded to a national e-learning platform.
In Mexico City, intergenerational centres known as “Utopias” (Unidades de Transformación y Organización Para la Inclusión y la Armonía Social, or Units of Transformation and Organization for Inclusion and Social Harmony) bring together swimming pools, sports grounds, children’s play areas, and free activities for the elderly – which include dance classes, massages, aromatherapy, and martial arts.
Piloted by visionary mayor Clara Brugada in Iztapalapa, one of the city’s poorest neighbourhoods, the Utopias have reportedly already brought down serious offences like assault, robbery and murder by 25 to 74 percent depending on the area.
While these innovations are not all new – Uruguay’s National Integrated Care System (SNIC) has been operational for over a decade – they are part of a wider regional trend that picked up in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. Societies often experience a renewed need for social support and community ties in the wake of an economic crisis: but Covid highlighted more blatantly than ever the chronic lack of recognition and grossly uneven distribution of care, as well as the inadequacy of public infrastructure.
In Latin America, the pandemic set women’s labour market participation 10 years back as majority-women service jobs in tourism, hospitality and paid domestic work were particularly impacted by the crisis. Many struggled to return to work even after restrictions were lifted. They often faced choices not uncommon to women across the region who struggle to provide for their families: the informal economy – picking up odd jobs or selling cigarettes on the street – prostitution, or becoming drug mules for the cartels.
This reality compounded an already precarious situation marked by population ageing, the worsening impacts of climate change, and mounting political tensions over the harshness of life under neoliberalism. A wave of protests swept countries like Nicaragua (2018), Chile (2019), Colombia (2021), and Cuba (2021) during this period, some of which were violently repressed.
The combination of these various crises laid bare the need for a bold approach to care as a strategic investment in social justice and development. Rather than taking surface-level steps to appease specific interest groups, many Latin American countries began redesigning entire economies around care as essential public infrastructure.
Significant progress has been made since then. To point to just a few national examples, Panama’s 2024 care law created new diplomas to better recognise skills in eldercare and disability care; Colombia and Chile’s new care systems are already estimated to contribute 19.6 percent and 25.6 percent of their respective economies. Meanwhile, Mexico and Peru are promisingly moving towards embedding their own comprehensive frameworks into law.
The essential role of grassroots activism
Particularly crucial to these policies’ effectiveness and revolutionary nature is the fact that many of them were developed with genuine input from civil society. Chile Cuida, Chile’s ambitious project for a new care-forward constitution, was the product of a large-scale public consultation conducted in 2023 by a specially created Constituent Assembly2.
More than twelve thousand people – 80 percent of them women – shared their lived experiences, helping tailor Chile Cuida to their specific struggles and needs. The process was also enriched by the tight collaboration between public officials and grassroots organisations like APañales, a network supporting caregivers in vulnerable communities.
Similarly, Belém’s municipal care policy was developed in conjunction with the Belém Care Activist Network, which brings together thirteen feminist organisations who have spent decades laying the seeds of this change.
“The biggest shift has been putting care at the centre of public policy, not just academic debates”, said Virginia Gontijo, programme lead for UN Women Brazil. “For the first time, care policy in Brazil is being shaped with full participation from both government and civil society.”3
Persistent obstacles
The region is, of course, not homogenous in its outlook on care. There are 33 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, and only 17 are actively building transformative care systems4 – each within its particular political, social and economic situation.
Entrenched gender norms and powerful religious institutions can delay progress on policies seen to disrupt the traditional family structure: most Latin American countries, for example, still provide less than 10 days’ statutory paternity leave.
Right-wing electoral victories are also threatening to reverse the last few years’ advances, as ambitious care policies become prime targets for neoliberal cost-cutting. In the two years since his election, hard-right libertarian Javier Milei has killed or cut back 47 out of Argentina’s 50 care provisions – including various childcare benefits, pensions for the elderly, and food stamps. Fifty ‘Community Care and Support Centres’ for people struggling with substance abuse have also been closed.
The region’s persistent security challenges mean that care is often a variable in the push-and-pull between short-term repressive frameworks and long-term, prevention-based approaches to tackling organised crime. It takes exceptional leadership to navigate this delicate balance, like that of Mexico’s Claudia Sheinbaum, who has so far managed to hold firm on both a bold care strategy and a strong stance on cartel violence.
Her administration is betting on a ‘third way’ between the equally ineffective strategies of two of her predecessors – Felipe Calderón’s ‘War on Drugs’ and Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s ‘hugs, not bullets’. Though recent assassinations are testing Sheinbaum’s stance, preliminary results showing a 32% drop in the country’s murder rate could make for convincing evidence that being both generous on care and ‘tough on crime’ is, in fact, possible.
Care-forward institutional leadership
The new ambitious tone on care echoes at the very top. In March 2025, the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) launched a new initiative called “IDB Cares” to better structure and fund the development of care infrastructure across the region, stating that “care is the foundation of thriving societies and economies”. Last August, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights became the first international tribunal to recognise the right to care – which includes giving care, receiving care and caring for oneself – as an autonomous human right.
One regional institution in particular has been consistently pushing for a more holistic understanding of care: the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC). In 2022, at the commission’s 15th Regional Conference on Women in Latin America and the Caribbean, member states adopted the Buenos Aires commitment, placing care at the center of the region’s socio-economic agenda.
Last August, at the most recent conference, the Tlatelolco commitment established a Decade of Action (2025-2035) to build a “care society”. ECLAC defines it as such:
“A profound transformation in the social, economic, and environmental dimensions of development, recognising the role of care in sustaining life and the planet, acknowledging eco-dependence (human dependence on nature), interdependence among people, and care as a necessity, an essential job, and a right.”5
Their 175-page proposal draws on the likes of Joan Tronto, Judith Butler and the Indigenous ‘Buen Vivir’ social philosophy, which defends “community-centric, ecologically balanced and culturally sensitive” modes of living.
In genuinely quite radical language for an international economic institution, ECLAC recognises that “vulnerability is intrinsic to the human condition” — going beyond the limited understanding that people need care only at particular moments of their life. The commission positions the care society as “an alternative to extractive economies that dispossess indigenous land and livelihoods and lead to an increase in violence.”
Playing catch-up
These institutional commitments matter. While many have diagnosed the UN’s normative positioning with terminal irrelevance, the ability of rights-based frameworks to act as vectors for change is not to be entirely discounted.
First, because care-forward economic restructuring can be “a strategic entry point for advancing feminist principles in policy negotiations, as the topic of care in general is sometimes less contentious than other topics related to gender equality.”6 In a time where many other rights are threatened, and states like Sweden and Canada are reneging on their feminist foreign policy (FFP) commitments, care is a good way to keep building coalitions around frameworks that directly improve women’s lives while losing nothing of their political strength and explicit feminist nature.
Second, because Latin American countries are creating essential blueprints and dragging others along with them. Just last month, the EU and sixteen countries of Latin America and the Caribbean agreed to an ‘EU-LAC Bi-regional Pact on Care’, which “builds on the momentum of key regional and multilateral commitments that call for care work to be recognised, valued, and fairly distributed at the global level”.
This twists on its head the linear story Global North countries like to tell themselves – and everybody else – about development. When it comes to care policy, the Global North is playing catch-up. Far from centering vulnerability and interdependence, leaders in the West are still confining care to a narrow, compartmentalised and largely health-based understanding.
A global moment
This cross-pollination from Latin American countries outwards mirrors the one underway at the local level: initiatives like the Manzanas del Cuidado and Utopias are being piloted in cities around the world. As Manuel de Araújo, mayor of Quelimane (Mozambique) put it: “It’s an idea that is replicable not just from Addis Ababa to Maputo, but in London and Bristol.”
It’s now up to us to take those blueprints and replicate them in our own countries, our own cities, our own communities. To bring forth a truly wholesale understanding of care as a right, a public good, a structuring principle of social life, and a central concern of political decision-making.
The construction of a care society is still in its inception. To help us take it forward, please consider becoming a paid subscriber.
If you want to partner with or write for the Institute, reach out to Mélina Magdelénat at melina@fifthwaveinstitute.com.
DANE, “Tiempo de cuidados: La cifras de la desigualdad”. National time-use study report. Cited in BBC News Mundo, 2023.
For more information on Chile Cuida, see Public Services International’s report “Chile Cuida: Care in Chile’s New Constitution.”
Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay, and Venezuela (UN Women).
Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), The care society: a horizon for sustainable recovery with gender equality (LC/CRM.15/3), Santiago, 2022.
Evyn Papworth, The Global Observatory, 2025. Linking Feminist Foreign Policy and the Care Economy in Latin America’.
Congratulations on a great article and a fantastic piece of reporting, Mélina. It made me think of the concept of ‘cuidadanía’, or caring citizenship, which the Spanish philosopher Irene Comins Mingol mentioned in my interview with her on my Substack earlier this year. It also made me think that I really ought to interview some Latin American thinkers on care on my podcast!