When an older Colombian needs more help at home, the first additional hours of care are often created not by opening a new publicly funded service but by rearranging somebody else’s day. A daughter changes her working hours. A wife takes over medication and personal care. A sister begins visiting every morning. A woman who was already combining employment, household work and care for children adds an aging parent to the responsibilities she carries.
This is why gender belongs at the center of Colombia’s long-term care debate. The country’s formal health, older-person and community services operate above a much larger care economy in which unpaid work remains distributed very unequally. The Colombia Aging, Long-Term Care & Community Support Knowledge Hub examines that wider system because understanding who provides care is as important as understanding which institutions fund or regulate it.
Colombia has developed unusually valuable statistical tools for making this work visible. DANE’s Encuesta Nacional de Uso del Tiempo and Cuenta Satélite de Economía del Cuidado quantify activities that conventional economic accounts can otherwise obscure. The latest evidence reinforces the scale of the gender divide. For September 2024 to August 2025, 89.8% of women aged ten and over participated in unpaid work and related activities, compared with 65.2% of men. Provisional 2024 time-transfer accounts indicate that women averaged approximately 23 hours a week of unpaid domestic and care work, compared with nine hours for men.
The policy response is also changing. Colombia’s Política Nacional de Cuidado, approved through CONPES 4143 in February 2025, explicitly connects care with rights, autonomy and social and gender co-responsibility. Its significance for long-term care is profound: an aging society cannot sustainably increase its care requirements by continually transferring additional unpaid work to women.
Colombia has made the care economy economically visible
The idea of a care economy challenges a simple distinction between productive economic activity and private household life. Cooking for a dependent person, helping someone bathe, supervising a relative with cognitive impairment, cleaning a home, accompanying an older person to healthcare and organizing medicines all contribute to wellbeing and social reproduction, even when no wage changes hands.
Colombia formally strengthened recognition of this work through Ley 1413 de 2010, which established the basis for incorporating the care economy into the national accounts. DANE’s Care Economy Satellite Account subsequently created a mechanism for measuring the economic value of unpaid domestic and care work and its relationship with the wider economy.
The scale is substantial. DANE’s provisional valuation for 2024 estimated unpaid domestic and care work at approximately COP 340.463 trillion using the specialist replacement-cost method. DANE reported that this exceeded the gross value added generated by some of Colombia’s largest conventional groups of economic activity.
That figure should not be interpreted as money that could simply be converted into a government budget or paid directly to households. Economic valuation serves a different purpose: it demonstrates that unpaid care represents productive activity with measurable value rather than an inexhaustible private resource outside the economy.
This creates a stronger analytical basis for social value and community impact. Decisions about long-term care expenditure look different when the alternative is not “no cost” but a transfer of time, employment opportunity and physical responsibility into households.
The gender gap is about time as well as money
Money is only one dimension of inequality. Time is equally important because every hour devoted to unpaid care is an hour that cannot simultaneously be used for employment, education, rest, relationships or other forms of participation.
DANE’s provisional 2024 National Time Transfer Accounts reported that women spent around 23 hours each week on unpaid domestic and care work compared with nine hours for men. The measure covers the wider unpaid care economy rather than older-person care alone, but that is precisely why it matters to long-term care planning. Care responsibilities accumulate across the life course rather than beginning suddenly when a parent reaches a particular age.
A woman may spend earlier adulthood combining employment with childcare, later support a relative with disability and then become responsible for aging parents or a spouse. Each individual decision may appear temporary. Across decades, however, the cumulative effect can influence earnings, savings, pension security, career progression and the woman’s own resources when she reaches later life.
Time-use evidence therefore changes the policy question. Instead of asking only how many women are employed, policymakers can ask how paid and unpaid work are being combined and whether the organization of care limits genuine economic choice.
The distinction is particularly important as Colombia ages. Greater longevity is positive, but an increase in the number of people living with frailty, disability, dementia or multiple chronic conditions can generate additional care hours. If the default response is for women to absorb those hours, demographic change can reinforce existing gender inequalities.
Why women become the default caregivers
Unequal care is not explained by a single cause. Cultural expectations matter, but they interact with labor markets, income differences, service availability, family geography and the cost of purchasing assistance.
Within a household, allocating more care to the person earning less may initially appear financially rational. Because women often already experience weaker labor-market attachment or lower earnings, however, that decision can reproduce the conditions that made it appear rational in the first place.
Social expectations also shape what families regard as normal. Daughters may be expected to provide intimate personal care while sons contribute money or transport. Wives may continue caring for husbands despite developing health limitations of their own. Women may also perform the coordination work surrounding care: arranging appointments, communicating with professionals, purchasing supplies and maintaining family communication.
This administrative and emotional labor is easy to overlook because it is less visible than bathing or meal preparation.
Service availability then influences how much choice a family actually has. Where reliable home support, respite or community provision is difficult to access, households cannot redistribute care simply through changed attitudes. A campaign encouraging men to do more unpaid care may address one dimension of inequality, but it does not create additional professional care capacity.
The stronger analysis therefore combines culture with infrastructure. Gender equality in care depends on changing expectations while also increasing the range of realistic alternatives available to households.
Scenario: a daughter’s working life becomes the adjustment mechanism
A 48-year-old accountant in Medellín has two teenage children and works full time. Her 77-year-old mother lives nearby and initially needs only occasional assistance with shopping and medical appointments.
After a fall, the mother returns home with reduced mobility. Her daughter works remotely for several days and begins visiting each morning. What was intended as temporary help continues because her mother remains anxious about bathing alone and needs assistance attending rehabilitation appointments.
The family discusses alternatives. Her brother lives farther away and earns more, so the apparently efficient arrangement is for him to contribute financially while his sister reduces her working week. Everyone remains involved, but the consequences are different. He retains his salary, career trajectory and pension contributions. She supplies the time.
A better response does not begin by judging the family’s decision. It identifies the structural pressures producing it. Rehabilitation may improve the mother’s functional ability. Targeted home assistance could remove the need for morning personal care. Community provision or transport support may reduce the daughter’s coordination burden. The brother can also assume tasks that do not require geographic proximity.
The daughter may still choose to provide substantial care. The important change is that the arrangement becomes a decision among alternatives rather than the automatic consequence of being the available woman.
For long-term care systems, this is a practical example of equity and disparities impact: the outcome of a care pathway includes what happens to the person providing the unpaid labor as well as the older person receiving assistance.
Care inequality can accumulate into economic inequality
The immediate financial effect of unpaid care may be a reduction in earnings. The longer-term consequences are wider.
Repeated absence, reduced hours or movement into more flexible but less secure work can weaken promotion opportunities. Time outside formal employment can affect pension contributions and savings. Women who become financially dependent on partners or relatives may have less control over household decisions and fewer options if relationships change.
The result is a potentially circular relationship between care and economic insecurity. Women undertake more unpaid care because their paid work is valued less; undertaking more unpaid care can then further weaken their position in paid work.
This also has consequences for future long-term care demand. A woman who spends years providing unpaid care may enter her own older age with fewer financial resources to purchase assistance. The care system can therefore transfer costs across generations and across time rather than eliminate them.
Long-term care financing debates need to account for these hidden transfers. Public expenditure may remain lower in the short term because families supply care, while the social-protection consequences emerge years later.
The relevant question is not whether families should contribute. Families are likely to remain central to care in Colombia. It is whether the distribution of responsibility leaves people with meaningful choices and whether the wider system recognizes the economic consequences of those choices.
CONPES 4143 reframes care as shared responsibility
The Política Nacional de Cuidado represents an important change because it does not treat gender inequality as an incidental side effect of care. It places social and gender co-responsibility within the policy architecture itself.
Approved through CONPES 4143 on February 14, 2025, the policy is intended to contribute to a transformation of Colombia’s social organization of care through 2034. It recognizes the right to care, receive care and exercise self-care and incorporates principles including universality, autonomy, participation, solidarity in financing and social and gender co-responsibility.
The policy extends well beyond older people. It concerns people requiring care, assistance or support across the life course; paid and unpaid caregivers; and community, collective, ethnic and campesino forms of care. Its approved action plan contains 133 actions.
For gender equality, several strands are particularly important: recognition and effective enjoyment of caregivers’ rights, transformation of cultural factors that sustain unequal care arrangements, and stronger state capacity to respond to demand for care and support.
These ambitions do not mean that Colombia already has a universal long-term care service or that every woman providing unpaid care now has an enforceable entitlement to replacement care. The developing Sistema Nacional de Cuidado remains an evolving architecture, and implementation is distributed across institutions, territories and existing service systems.
Nevertheless, the policy establishes a different direction of travel. The objective is not merely to make women better equipped to continue carrying disproportionate responsibility. It is to redistribute care.
Recognition, reduction and redistribution require different interventions
Care policy can easily become imprecise because several objectives are grouped together as “support for caregivers.” In practice, recognition, reduction and redistribution require different responses.
Recognition makes unpaid care visible in statistics, public policy and service assessment. Colombia’s time-use surveys and satellite account are particularly important here.
Reduction addresses avoidable or unnecessarily burdensome work. Rehabilitation that improves an older person’s mobility, accessible transport, assistive equipment, reliable medication systems or simpler administrative processes can all reduce the amount of unpaid labor required without reducing support.
Redistribution changes who performs the remaining work. Responsibility can shift between women and men, among relatives, between households and communities, and between unpaid and paid services.
These approaches should not be confused. Providing caregiver training may improve competence but could actually reinforce inequality if it simply enables women to undertake increasingly complex tasks that formal services would otherwise perform.
Similarly, technology can reduce administrative burden while simultaneously transferring new monitoring responsibilities to relatives.
The governance question is therefore not simply whether a caregiver intervention exists. It is whether the intervention changes the distribution, intensity or sustainability of care in the intended direction.
Organizations examining comparable cross-sector strategies can use the Governance Maturity Assessment to structure questions about accountability, decision rights and evidence. It is not a Colombian policy instrument, but its underlying discipline is relevant: ambitious commitments need identifiable ownership and assurance if they are to alter operational reality.
Long-term care capacity cannot be planned independently of women’s employment
Long-term care and labor-market policy are often analyzed separately. Colombia’s care economy demonstrates why that separation is increasingly difficult to sustain.
If more women enter or remain in paid employment, household capacity to provide extensive daytime care may fall. That is not a policy failure. Greater economic participation can be an intended social and gender-equality outcome. But it means formal and community care infrastructure must develop alongside it.
Conversely, insufficient care infrastructure can constrain labor supply. Women may decline employment, reduce hours or move into informal work because someone needs to remain available for a child, disabled relative or older family member.
This creates a two-way relationship between the care economy and the wider economy.
For long-term care planning, workforce forecasts should therefore look beyond the number of nurses, gerontology professionals and paid care workers. They should also examine assumptions about how much assistance households will continue to supply.
A model that predicts growing dependency but assumes constant unlimited family care can substantially underestimate future formal workforce requirements.
The Digital Twin Scenario Modeler provides a general framework through which organizations can explore how changing demand, workforce capacity and service assumptions interact. It does not model Colombia automatically, but the scenario principle is important: changes in unpaid care availability should be treated as a variable in long-term care capacity planning rather than an invisible constant.
Scenario: a municipality treats care infrastructure as economic infrastructure
A medium-sized Colombian municipality is reviewing its aging population, women’s employment participation and demand for older-person services. Traditionally, these datasets have been considered by different teams.
The municipality instead examines them together.
Local information shows neighborhoods with growing numbers of older residents, substantial travel times to existing daytime provision and high levels of unpaid care. Consultations with women reveal that service opening hours often do not align with employment and that transport itself consumes significant caregiver time.
The municipality cannot create a comprehensive national long-term care entitlement. It can, however, use its own responsibilities and available programs more strategically. It reviews whether community and older-person provision is located where need is developing, whether schedules enable caregivers to maintain employment and whether home and community services can reach people for whom facility-based support is impractical.
Economic-development colleagues are involved because care availability affects labor participation. Health partners are involved because functional decline and poorly managed chronic conditions increase household care requirements. Older people and caregivers participate because administrative assumptions about what families need do not necessarily reflect everyday experience.
The resulting plan treats care provision as infrastructure that enables both wellbeing and economic participation.
This does not mean every care investment pays for itself through employment gains. Its importance lies in recognizing interconnected outcomes rather than assigning all benefits and costs to a single departmental budget.
Formal care jobs also have a gender dimension
Redistributing unpaid care toward formal services creates another challenge: paid care work itself is often highly feminized.
A system has not necessarily achieved gender equality if care moves from an unpaid daughter to a low-paid woman with insecure working conditions.
The quality of formal care therefore depends on the status of the workforce performing it. Training, supervision, employment conditions, career progression, travel time and continuity all influence whether expansion produces sustainable capacity.
Colombia’s 2026 regulation of the gerontology profession through Ley 2612 is relevant to the wider professional landscape, particularly as the country strengthens expertise relating to aging. But long-term care also depends on a broader mixture of health professionals, rehabilitation staff, home-support workers, community roles and other paid caregivers.
Workforce development should avoid creating an artificial divide between professional expertise and practical care. Older people with increasing dependency may need both.
There is also an important productivity question. Improving care productivity should mean reducing unnecessary administrative work, strengthening coordination and using skills effectively. It should not simply mean asking each worker to care for more people at greater intensity.
This connects gender equality with workforce, care teams and skill mix. The status of women in the care economy depends on conditions in paid care as well as the redistribution of unpaid work.
Men’s participation matters, but redistribution cannot stop at the household
Greater involvement of men in unpaid care is essential to gender co-responsibility. It can normalize sons providing personal support, fathers undertaking domestic work and male partners sharing routine caregiving rather than contributing only episodically.
Yet household redistribution alone cannot resolve rising long-term care demand.
If a woman currently provides ten hours of additional care and five of those hours move to a man in the same household, gender distribution improves but the family still supplies ten hours. Where care needs increase substantially, the larger question is how responsibility is shared between households and the wider care system.
That requires formal services, community capacity, accessible health pathways, rehabilitation, caregiver support and appropriate social protection.
Social co-responsibility therefore broadens gender co-responsibility. It asks not only whether men and women divide unpaid work more fairly, but whether families as a whole are expected to provide levels of care that should reasonably be supported elsewhere.
This distinction will become more important as demographic structures change. Smaller families, migration and increased employment participation can reduce the number of relatives available to share care even where gender norms improve.
Rural women face a different care economy
National averages conceal substantial territorial variation.
In rural and dispersed areas, women may combine unpaid care with agricultural work, household production and community responsibilities. Formal services can be farther away, transport more difficult and specialist support less accessible.
At the same time, campesino, Indigenous, Afro-Colombian and other communities may have collective care practices and cultural understandings that cannot be reduced to an urban service model. CONPES 4143 explicitly recognizes community, collective, ethnic and campesino care, creating an opportunity to build policy around existing social capacity rather than assuming that all care should be individualized or institutionalized.
Recognition should not become an excuse for underinvestment. Strong community relationships do not remove the need for professional health services, respite, rehabilitation, equipment or financial protection.
This is where gender and rural and underserved community inequalities intersect. A rural woman can face a double burden: more responsibility because formal alternatives are scarce and greater difficulty accessing support for herself.
Territorial care strategies therefore need to understand travel, service density, connectivity, community networks and cultural context. Equality does not necessarily mean identical delivery models in Bogotá and a dispersed rural municipality. It means comparable attention to rights and outcomes through arrangements capable of functioning in each setting.
Scenario: care work in rural Nariño is shared, but not equally
An older man in rural Nariño lives with his wife and an adult daughter. He has reduced mobility and chronic respiratory disease. Extended relatives and neighbors help with transport and agricultural tasks, giving the household a stronger informal network than many urban families have.
Yet most daily personal support is performed by the daughter. She prepares meals, accompanies her father when he travels for healthcare and manages administrative communication. She also contributes to the household’s economic activity.
Describing the family as having “strong community support” would therefore be accurate but incomplete.
A territorial response maps the actual distribution of work. Some tasks can be shared within the family and community. Mobile or outreach services can reduce journeys. Better coordination of appointments reduces repeated travel. Rehabilitation and appropriate equipment may enable the father to perform more tasks independently.
Where digital communication is useful, connectivity and the daughter’s time are considered rather than assuming telehealth is costless to households.
The objective is not to dismantle a valued family and community network. It is to ensure that public systems do not rely on its existence without examining who inside that network is carrying the greatest burden.
This is the practical difference between celebrating community care and governing it through a data-led equity planning perspective.
Technology can redistribute work or simply relocate it
Digital transformation offers important opportunities for Colombia’s care economy. Telehealth can reduce travel. Shared information can prevent caregivers repeatedly explaining the same circumstances. Remote consultation can extend specialist reach. Digital scheduling and communication can make services easier to navigate.
But every digital intervention should be examined through a care-work lens.
A monitoring application may save professional time while requiring a daughter to check alerts throughout the day. A teleconsultation may eliminate a journey but still require a relative to take time away from work to set up the device, assist communication and remain present. An online portal may simplify administration for digitally confident households while creating another barrier for people with limited connectivity or skills.
Technology therefore does not automatically reduce care. It can remove, automate, redistribute or create tasks.
The stronger governance approach asks who performs each task before and after implementation and whether the change affects autonomy, privacy or workload.
Organizations exploring similar questions can use the Digital Transformation, AI and Cybersecurity Readiness Assessment to structure consideration of governance, workforce and implementation readiness. It is not an official Colombian assessment, but it reinforces an important principle: digital modernization should be evaluated as organizational and human change rather than merely technology deployment.
This also connects with digital exclusion and access to care. Technology that depends on unpaid female digital labor can inadvertently reproduce the inequality it is intended to reduce.
Care policy must protect autonomy as well as redistribute labor
Gender analysis should not allow the older person receiving care to disappear from view.
Reducing a woman’s unpaid workload is important, but the replacement arrangement must still respect the older person’s dignity, preferences and autonomy. A daughter should not be expected to provide intimate care simply because she is family; equally, an older woman should not be moved into residential provision merely because that is administratively easier than developing support at home.
Care relationships contain two sets of rights and sometimes competing preferences.
An older parent may refuse external assistance because they value privacy. Their daughter may no longer be able to provide the same level of support. A spouse may want to continue caregiving while professionals are concerned about the physical impact on them. Families may disagree about risk, money or where an older person should live.
These situations require supported decision-making, proportionate risk management and honest discussion about capacity rather than assumptions based on gender or family status.
The wider rights, consent and decision-making framework is therefore integral to care-economy reform. Redistribution should expand choices for both caregivers and people receiving care.
Scenario: a wife is not an unlimited substitute for formal care
A couple in Cali have been married for more than fifty years. The husband develops dementia and increasingly needs supervision. His wife wants him to remain at home and initially rejects outside assistance because she sees caring for him as part of their marriage.
Over time she stops attending social activities, sleeps poorly and becomes anxious about leaving him even briefly. Their adult children praise her commitment but live elsewhere and underestimate the intensity of the role.
A person-centered review does not begin by telling her she must stop caregiving. Nor does it assume that her willingness means no additional support is required.
The husband’s abilities, preferences and risks are considered alongside his wife’s health and choices. Some routines are redesigned to preserve what he can still do independently. Family members agree predictable periods when they will be present. External support is introduced gradually for selected tasks, allowing his wife to leave the home without feeling that she is abandoning him.
The intervention changes the meaning of support. Formal care is not replacing the marriage; it is protecting the conditions under which the relationship can continue without the wife becoming a permanently available workforce.
If his dementia progresses, the plan is reviewed before exhaustion determines the next decision.
This is why gender-sensitive care planning should measure quality of life and sustainability rather than simply whether a family placement has been maintained.
Funding decisions determine whether co-responsibility becomes real
Policy can encourage redistribution, but substantial redistribution requires resources.
Colombia currently finances care through a combination of health-system expenditure, territorial budgets, older-person welfare mechanisms, household spending, private purchasing and unpaid work. The National Care Policy adds a broader framework for coordinating and expanding the care architecture, but it does not convert that fragmented financing into a single universal long-term care benefit.
CONPES 4143 includes indicative implementation resources through 2034. Those resources relate to the policy’s wider actions and should not be interpreted as a dedicated individual long-term care entitlement.
For older people, recent legislation also strengthens existing territorial mechanisms. Ley 2581 de 2026 supports the use of relevant older-person welfare resources for services including Centros Vida, Centros Día and home and community care programs, subject to territorial arrangements and budget availability.
The gender implication is straightforward. If additional community and home support is available, some care hours can move from households into formal provision. If service expansion does not keep pace with dependency, policy expectations can change while women’s workload remains largely unchanged.
This is why funding and payment models are also gender-policy instruments. The distribution of public and private expenditure influences the distribution of unpaid time.
Measurement must move from visibility to accountability
Colombia has already achieved something important by making unpaid care statistically visible. The next stage is using that evidence to test whether policy is changing outcomes.
DANE’s Care Economy Satellite Account reported a provisional economic value of approximately COP 340.463 trillion for unpaid domestic and care work in 2024. Its time-transfer accounts show the continuing gap between women’s and men’s unpaid work. ENUT provides further evidence about participation in paid and unpaid activity.
These measures provide a national baseline for understanding structural inequality. Implementation governance needs to connect them with more operational questions.
By 2034, decision-makers should be able to examine whether:
- the gender gap in unpaid domestic and care time is narrowing;
- caregivers have greater access to reliable support and respite;
- women are better able to combine employment with care without disproportionate economic penalty;
- formal home and community capacity is expanding where dependency is increasing;
- rural and disadvantaged territories are benefiting rather than falling further behind; and
- people receiving care experience greater autonomy, continuity and quality of life rather than merely a transfer between caregivers.
Measurement should also distinguish activity from impact. Registering caregivers, holding training sessions or establishing territorial initiatives demonstrates implementation effort. It does not by itself demonstrate redistribution.
The Quality Dashboard Builder offers a general method for structuring indicators across access, quality, workforce and outcomes. Applied conceptually, that type of balanced measurement can help prevent care policy from becoming accountable only for what government delivers rather than what changes in people’s lives.
Governance must span institutions because care spans lives
The care economy does not fit neatly within one ministry or one service system.
Gender equality, employment, health, disability, aging, education, social protection, territorial government and economic policy all influence how care is organized. CONPES 4143 reflects that breadth through an intersectoral policy architecture.
The challenge is maintaining coherent stewardship while Colombia’s institutional arrangements continue to develop. During 2026, the governance framework for the Sistema Nacional de Cuidado remained in transition. Regulatory proposals had been developed, legislative proposals were also moving through Congress, and the Ministry of Equality and Equity entered liquidation.
These developments should be distinguished carefully. An approved national policy is not the same as a finalized institutional structure, and a proposed law or draft regulatory mechanism should not be presented as already implemented.
Operational continuity nevertheless matters. The 133 actions within the approved policy require monitoring across the period to 2034. Territorial initiatives need guidance and learning mechanisms. Caregiver and community participation needs a route into decision-making. Data needs to inform resource allocation rather than remaining descriptive.
This is a form of system leadership and cross-sector governance: no institution controls every determinant of care, but responsibilities still need to connect sufficiently for policy objectives to survive organizational boundaries.
The next test is whether care becomes genuinely more shareable
Colombia’s care policy has moved beyond a narrow argument that unpaid work deserves greater recognition. Recognition is necessary, but the more difficult test is whether care becomes more shareable in practice.
That means men carrying more responsibility inside households. It means formal services absorbing tasks that should not depend indefinitely on relatives. It means community organizations being supported without their contribution becoming a justification for state withdrawal. It means paid care workers receiving the capability and conditions necessary to provide continuity. It also means prevention and rehabilitation reducing avoidable dependency rather than assuming every increase in need should produce additional caregiving hours.
The strongest opportunity lies in designing care as infrastructure.
Roads enable people to reach work. Schools enable children to learn while parents participate in economic life. Health systems protect functioning and productivity. Care services similarly enable older and disabled people to live with dignity while allowing relatives to participate more fully in employment, education and community life.
Seen this way, investment in care is not simply expenditure on dependency. It contributes to the functioning of households, labor markets and communities.
What Colombia offers international care-system thinking
Colombia’s experience is particularly valuable internationally because measurement and policy reform are being connected.
Many countries know that women perform more unpaid care but struggle to incorporate that reality into mainstream economic and long-term care planning. Colombia’s Care Economy Satellite Account demonstrates one way of making household production economically visible, while the National Care Policy attempts to translate recognition into a broader rights and co-responsibility framework.
The Colombian model cannot be transplanted wholesale. Countries differ in social insurance, taxation, labor markets, family structures, decentralization and existing long-term care entitlements.
The transferable lesson lies in the analytical approach.
Long-term care systems should ask who supplies the hours of care that do not appear in formal service statistics; whether those hours are distributed equitably; what economic consequences follow; and whether policy interventions genuinely redistribute responsibility or simply make existing caregivers more efficient.
This perspective also challenges simplistic comparisons based only on public long-term care expenditure. A system spending less may not require less care. It may simply finance more of that care through women’s unpaid time.
Colombia’s emerging approach therefore adds an important dimension to international debates about long-term system impact: sustainability should be assessed across public budgets, paid work, households and human wellbeing rather than through government expenditure alone.
Conclusion
Women’s unpaid work is one of the largest resources sustaining Colombia’s care economy, but its scale should not be mistaken for unlimited capacity. DANE’s increasingly sophisticated measurement makes the contribution visible: women participate in unpaid work at markedly higher rates than men, spend substantially more time on it and collectively generate enormous economic value through activities that conventional service accounts do not capture.
Colombia’s central strategic opportunity is to convert that visibility into redistribution. CONPES 4143 provides an important policy framework by linking care with rights, autonomy and social and gender co-responsibility. But policy language alone cannot rebalance the care economy. Progress depends on accessible home and community services, stronger paid-care capacity, prevention and rehabilitation, employment-compatible support, territorial adaptation, participation and financing that recognizes the true consequences of leaving needs unmet.
The objective should not be a society in which families cease caring for one another. It should be one in which care is not assigned by gender, sustained through hidden economic sacrifice or assumed to be freely expandable whenever formal provision is insufficient.
As Colombia builds its care architecture toward 2034, the decisive measure of progress will be whether women gain more genuine choices over their time while older and disabled people gain more reliable choices over how they live. Achieving both would demonstrate that care has moved from being an invisible household adjustment to a shared component of social and economic infrastructure.