By Megan Clement
When it comes to care provision, the world faces something of a perfect storm as populations age, family structures shrink and more women enter the workforce. It's a crisis in the making, the International Labour Organization (ILO) warned in a recent report. And unless governments start properly investing in care services, gender inequality will increase and economies will suffer.
The demand for care work is set to increase significantly in the next decade, with 2.3 billion people needing care by 2030, the ILO report concludes in its report released in late June. What remains to be determined is whether this work will be high quality and well remunerated, or low quality and exploitative. The answer to that question, lead author Laura Addati explains, will determine in large part how the crisis plays out.
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Mayra Buvinic, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development, says this dynamic applies to the elderly as well, and that the developing world will be affected just as much as the developed.
"In the developing world, you're still under the notion that families will take care of their elderly, but that's not the case anymore in a lot of places," she says. "And then what do you do with your elderly?"
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