<
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/09/27/bogota-care-blocks-women-equality-poverty/>
"BOGOTÁ, Colombia — One day in the distant future, caregiving could be as
celebrated as carrying a football into an end zone. Rather than toil in the
shadows, people who juggle children and aging parents might be applauded for
their skills — or stopped on the street by admirers. Family caregivers could
get paid for the hours they put in minding the young, the sick, the disabled
and the old. Men would be as proud as women to care for their children.
Governments would fund more services to relieve at-home caregiving, recognizing
its physical and psychological toll. And, while we’re dreaming, women, with
increased options to work outside of uncompensated caregiving, could wield as
much political and economic power as men.
Predicting this future today is, unfortunately, more the stuff of speculative
fiction than data-driven reality. So for now, consider a small experiment
hatched in Ciudad Bolívar, the second-poorest district of Colombia’s capital
city, where settlements of makeshift houses sprawl up a steep mountainside,
emblazoned with colorful street murals. This district has long been a hotbed of
political resistance, home to diverse Indigenous peoples as well as Venezuelan
refugees. Women here suffer the capital’s highest rates of domestic abuse and
sexual violence. Until 2018, when the city put up an electric cable-car line to
connect residents to the public bus system, the only links from Ciudad Bolívar
to the city center were dangerous, dizzying roads and uneven footpaths.
Since 2020, it has become the site of Bogotá’s first manzana del cuidado, or
“care block,” in a city where caregivers — mostly women, mostly poor —
ordinarily labor in obscurity without compensation or formal recognition. More
than 30 percent of Bogotá’s female population, some 1.2 million women, provide
unpaid care full time, some for as much as 10 hours a day. Most lack formal
education beyond some years of high school, and the city estimates that 1 of
every 5 of these women has a diagnosed illness, ranging from arthritis from
long hours spent hand-washing clothes to sexually transmitted diseases and
untreated cancers. And many of them, says Nathalia Poveda, who manages the
Manitas care block in Ciudad Bolívar, don’t recognize that when their husbands
hit them, it is domestic abuse.
A care block is a modest attempt to shift the way caregivers are viewed and
supported, and the way they view themselves. It’s a community-scale solution —
something that’s needed if poor women are to benefit from global progress in
gender equality. In Ciudad Bolívar, women can drop off dirty clothes and
bedding each week to a city-funded laundromat. Demand is so high in the
district, and given only four washing machines and dryers, the women have to
rotate out of using the program every three months. A community center offers
free courses to help women earn high school diplomas and practice yoga while
city employees mind the children, elderly or people with disabilities in their
care. Caregivers and their spouses can learn to use a computer or cellphone and
get STD testing, psychological counseling and legal aid — all under one roof.
In the same building, a child can get a strep test and his mom can get a Pap
smear, rather than having to shuffle to clinics around the city.
This isn’t rocket science, but it is innovation. “We need to care for the
people who care for us,” says Diana Rodríguez Franco, Bogotá’s secretary for
women’s affairs, who came up with the idea. The city now has 20 care blocks, as
well as a program to send relief caregivers directly to people’s homes. The
city funds the program with an annual budget of $800,000, and it has attracted
grants from global organizations for pilot projects such as caregiving classes
for men."
Via
What Could Go Right? October 5, 2023:
https://theprogressnetwork.org/natural-disaster-deaths-declining/
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
