African women’s exhaustion under the weight of care responsibilities has long been labelled as resilience. Across many communities, the ability to “hold things together” is treated less as evidence of systemic strain and more as a natural extension of womanhood. Yet globally, women continue to carry more than 75% of unpaid care work, with the burden particularly pronounced across Africa and the wider Global South. In Kenya, an Oxfam study found that women spend 11.1 hours daily on caregiving responsibilities, compared with 2.9 hours for men. These responsibilities range from caring for sick loved ones, childcare, and cooking, to activities that pertain to the emotional labour required to keep households running.
Factors such as water access, childcare demands, household decision-making, and spousal support all shape this imbalance. Strikingly, 70% of women reported satisfaction with the current division of care labour — perhaps the clearest indication that female endurance has become deeply intertwined with ideas of virtue, responsibility, and communal value.
“Strong African Woman”, “Women Are Good at Multitasking” same misdiagnosis
The moralization of female endurance continues to shape the African woman’s experience. Women are expected to manage the responsibilities assigned to them by virtue of gender steadily, competently, and most importantly, quietly. Over time, adaptation to dysfunction has been romanticized as resilience. This adaptation steadily chips away at women’s time, limiting their ability to build livelihoods, pursue education, protect their mental wellbeing, rest, or simply exist outside service to others. Across much of the continent, weak public systems and services continue functioning because women quietly compensate for the gaps they leave behind. When water access is unreliable, women reorganize their lives around shortages and storage. When schools close unexpectedly due to teachers’ strikes, emergency childcare coordination largely shifts onto them. Public dysfunction rarely disappears. More often, it is transferred into women’s labour, time, and emotional management.
The scale of invisible female labour subsidies is staggering. In Mali and Senegal, unpaid care work accounts for up to 17.6% and 13.9% of GDP, respectively, while Kenyan women’s contribution to unpaid care work came to 25.8 billion hours in 2021 alone. The cost is undeniable.
Time as Economic Infrastructure
As African economies position themselves within a rapidly changing global order, governments must begin to recognise time as a core economic resource. Time determines who can participate in the labour force, build businesses, move across borders, innovate, and engage politically and civically. Simply put, time is economic infrastructure. Yet across many African contexts, weak public systems continue quietly consuming women’s time at scale. When healthcare systems are overwhelmed, women provide home-based care. When public transport systems fail, women reorganize household schedules and absorb the disruption. The labour required to sustain daily life does not disappear when institutions fail. It is simply redistributed into women’s and girls’ time and labour. In many African societies, women have quietly stepped in to stabilize the gaps left by markets, institutions, and public systems. In many ways, economies appear more functional than they truly are because women continue bearing the hidden costs of keeping them running.
The Invisible Governance of Women’s Time
Would it be inaccurate to argue that many African women are functioning as informal ministries of social protection? In many ways, they are already running the administrative functions that sustain life. Governance extends far beyond ministerial offices and legislative chambers. Governance is the organization of communal life. It entails the maintenance of order, the allocation of resources, management of instability and the maintenance of continuity in the occurrence of disruption. When women coordinate transport systems, school schedules, food systems, caregiving networks, and family obligations, they are performing governance labour through active systems management. When they emotionally regulate households during crises, stretch budgets amid inflation, and preserve families’ social fabric under pressure, they are stabilising households and communities against breakdown. When they reorganize in response to delayed salaries, intervene during emergencies, and absorb unexpected school closures, they become first responders to systemic failure. These interventions quietly keep societies functional. Though privatized and feminized, this labour remains a significant yet largely invisible contribution to economic continuity, social stability, and political resilience.
Economics of Female Exhaustion
Africa has a physically burdened female population. Yet the greater injustice lies not only in exhaustion, but in the life outcomes this constant extraction of time produces. Women are left with limited space to pursue opportunity, interrupted ambition, emotional depletion, and constrained political participation. In effect, unequal care responsibilities directly shape women’s ability to autonomously pursue the lives they envision for themselves. Contrary to conventional belief, this is not solely a woman’s issue. It is a societal and economic burden. When governments ignore the scale of time extraction women experience, they lose unrealized potential in entrepreneurship, skilled labour, innovation, and workforce participation. The cost of subsidizing weak public systems is therefore effectively transferred to women. They deny themselves the representation, perspectives, and decision-making diversity of half their population. They also lose the creativity and innovation that emerge from a rested and fully realized female populace. Feminist political economy unearths that the exclusion of women is therefore not accidental – it is the result of coordinated structures that have assumed their consistent availability. These patriarchal demands eventually burn through the creative capacity that women possess and need to drive forward their own development.
Feminist Reform: The Missing Piece
According to Nancy Fraser’s outline on Capitalism’s Crisis of Care, feminist reform is not about helping women survive fundamentally unequal systems. It is about redesigning those systems so their functionality is no longer dependent on women’s invisible labour and endless adaptability. African societies cannot continue organizing themselves around the assumption that women will always absorb the gaps left behind by weak institutions, markets, and public systems.
Reducing the current reality in which women function as invisible extensions of government requires investment in a few critical areas. For starters, childcare must be treated as economic infrastructure through accessible and affordable care systems. To reduce the coordination burden that disproportionately falls on women, reliable public transport is needed. The “Three R’s of Unpaid Work” by Diane Elson highlights that investments in the critical infrastructure of water and energy can significantly reduce time spent on unpaid domestic labour. Further, governments must strengthen public care systems — particularly healthcare, eldercare, and social protection — to reduce the reality of women being left to manage collective survival privately.
Finally, labour systems must move beyond the assumption that workers have invisible support structures sustaining their lives in the background. Flexible work systems, equitable parental leave, and care-sensitive workplaces are no longer social luxuries. They are indicators of serious governance and economic intelligence.
Wanjiku Wanjohi is an Afro-feminist development practitioner and writer. Her work and thought process are embedded in Pan-Africanism and feminist political economy, across policy, advocacy, and systems reform spaces, supporting governments, regional institutions, and civil society actors. Through both her professional and writing platforms, Wanjiku explores the political realities shaping African societies — particularly the invisible systems of labour, care, governance, and survival that sustain everyday life.