By Mirela Xanthaki
UNITED NATIONS, Mar 17 2009 (IPS)

Caring for children, ailing relatives and neighbours, cooking and cleaning – all of it feels like “work,” but without the regular paycheque.

Jan Peterson Credit: Huairou Commission

Gender activists note that the vast majority of care givers are women, and the time they spend keeping households and communities running smoothly often prevents them from finding paid employment outside the home. At the same time, the lack of remuneration creates the impression that shouldering these kinds of responsibilities is of little value to society.

“Women want to be invested in, they want to have more training, but they want to do their own training too,” says Jan Peterson, who has devoted more than three decades to grassroots and local organising around women’s issues. “They want to be supported at building their own capacity in this work.”

A resident of Brooklyn, New York, Peterson is the founder and chair of the secretariat of the Huairou Commission, and also founder of GROOTS International, a women’s empowerment and development network.

“For poor women in Africa, working in HIV/AIDS care-giving is an everyday necessity, but also it is an entry level for organising and building power for themselves,” Peterson told IPS during the recent U.N. Commission on the Status of Women conference here. “Other people talk about the burden of care – people like me, who has an Alzheimer’s husband, or other people that have sick people at home.”

Excerpts from the interview follow.

IPS: How long has the issue of compensating for care work been on the table? JP: Wages for housework was on the agenda as long as I can remember and believe me, I go back to 1975 and the first conference [in Mexico City]. The women’s movement has been on this topic forever and we are actually tired of the topic because now is the time to act.

The first grassroots presence at a conference was in Huairou [China]. That is why we have this name – that is the city where the NGOs met during the Beijing conference [in 1995].

I feel great hope out of the excitement of doing the research and the fact that the women themselves have formed what they call the “Home Based Care Alliance” which is within countries and across countries. When poor women begin to organise, people usually listen because they say “Oh, that’s cute,” but now people are listening in terms of the strategies, from the Dutch to the G77 countries.

IPS: How do you go about placing a monetary value on care work? JP: Different groups have different opinions on how they want to be compensated. Some groups are saying that they want to be paid for their work, while others say that they don’t want to become an employee of the state. Instead of a minimum wage salary, they want other things. They may want financial support to add to a savings and credit club, they may want to get a piece of land so that they get extra food for their families and the people they are taking care of.

Lots of them said that they wanted to be given a status that they were caregivers so that they could make themselves visible. If they have a card, some kind of credentials, like all members of a professional organisation, it would make their work a lot easier.

IPS: How will the discussions proceed? JP: We talked with a lot of governments while they were here and they seem to be very interested, but they worry when you start to mention money. In a time of financial crisis, there is a need to look at how to put people to work, so that can be one way.

We have organised groups of caregivers in many countries, but in six of these countries the women are doing their own research. There is a quarter-million-dollar grant called “Compensation for Contribution” done together with UNDP where grassroots women are taking actions themselves, interviewing care givers within their countries (300 in each country) and they are going to show what their work has contributed to that community, to that city.

Some want pay, some want other things and they are fighting about it, it is not an easy proposition.

IPS: What other public policies would be useful? JP: There are many strategies available. What we have to ask ourselves is what kind of society do we have and what kind of institutions do we want to put in place. Do we want to have a place where people dying of AIDS are taken care of by their neighbours? Do we want to create grandmother centres so that grandmothers who are raising orphans have a place to go and they are not isolated in their homes, where they take support from each other, share frustrations and earn money from some small selling of products?

We don’t want everything run by the government, but the government can run and support a variety of initiatives. I would rather be taken care of by my neighbour than a stranger I don’t know. Who wants to go to a nursing home anyway?

IPS: What about male care givers? JP: Men care givers do exist and some talk about [their numbers] becoming more when you start to pay. Our group from Honduras talked (at the U.N. conference) about being fifty-fifty men and women. In fact, there is a large section of gay men that were care givers and they were open to push for this diversity.

Excerpt:

With a million people a year still dying from malaria, the United Nations is leading a new campaign to provide universal coverage of essential malaria control measures – particularly bed nets – in Africa by the end of 2010.

A female mosquito (Anopheles gambiae), feeding. Credit: US Centres for Disease Control & Prevention/Jim Gathany

“The funding for the nets will come from a combination of donor nations, multilateral institutions, and private sector corporations and grassroots campaigns,” Chambers told IPS.

Announcing the new strategy Friday, the first “World Malaria Day”, Chambers said the initiative would include long-lasting insecticidal bed nets or household spraying for at-risk populations, more effective diagnosis and treatment of malaria, and Intermittent Preventative Treatment (IPT) for pregnant women in the hardest hit areas.

Malaria is a disease that is only transmitted by female mosquitoes at night. Sub-Saharan Africa has 90 percent of the cases, but due to climate change, malaria is also creeping back to areas where it used to be eradicated.

Although there are drugs to treat malaria and simple, inexpensive preventive measures, it continues to be the single leading cause of death for children under age five in Africa. Every day, more than 3,000 children die of malaria – about one death every 30 seconds.

Overall, 350 to 500 million people each year are infected and one million of them die. Malaria also incapacitates people and prevents them from working, and as a result keeps countries poor. In addition to the substantial burden on local health systems, malaria costs Africa 12 billion dollars per year in lost productivity.

One of the easiest ways to prevent malaria is through the use of bed nets that stop mosquitoes from biting during the night and spreading the disease. The most effective types are coated with insecticide that kills mosquitoes when they land on it. The bed nets last for about five years.

Education is also a key component of malaria-control efforts. On Tuesday, the “Buzz and Bite Campaign”, consisting of animated and audio public service announcements in 20 languages, was formally launched at U.N. headquarters in New York.

“I believe that in my lifetime we have the capacity and the political and the financial resources to even eradicate malaria,” Firdaus Kharas, chairman of Chocolate Moose Media and creator of the campaign, told reporters.

Kharas estimated that the campaign has the potential to reach three billion people. It consists of comic sketches starring two female anopheles mosquitoes that give a variety of information on how people can shield themselves against malaria. The series will be provided free of charge to any organisation that asks, and it can be requested on line.

Then there is the “Nothing but Nets” campaign, which brings together people from the religious, civic and business world.

“For the first time ever, leaders from all walks of life – faith and business, sports and philanthropy – are mobilising millions of people to help achieve an important public health goal – covering the continent of Africa in life-saving bed nets,” said Timothy Wirth, president of the U.N. Foundation.

The campaign was created by the foundation in 2006, and has since raised almost 20 million dollars and distributed nearly one million nets in endemic African countries, including Angola, Mali, Nigeria and Chad. Still, as Thomas Bickerton, a bishop in the United Methodist Church, noted: “We have only scratched the surface of the need for nets.”

Chambers was optimistic that the goal could be reached. “We’ve seen unprecedented cooperation and collaboration between agencies through the leadership of the Roll Back Malaria Partnership,” he told IPS. “The only way to achieve the ambitious goal of universal coverage is to continue to work together and forge an unbreakable syndicate of donors, technical partners, and endemic countries.”

The Roll Back Malaria Partnership, an umbrella organisation that includes governments, donors, NGOs and technical partners, has launched the “Cover the Bed Net Gap” campaign. The initiative is already off to a strong start, with funding commitments for 31 million nets – although the estimated bed net gap remains around 120 million nets total.