This is Arlene Cinco, a shop owner and mother of four living in the Philippines. Her husband, Eduardo, suffered from a stroke in 2016 and became paralyzed, and she is now the sole breadwinner, working several jobs to earn money to pay the bills and for her husband's medications.

On top of bringing in her family's income, she also spends countless hours taking care of her husband and doing all the household chores. She loves being involved in her children's lives, but without any extra care or financial support, carving out valuable family time is impossible.

Recognizing, reducing, and redistributing unpaid care work will put us one step closer to a world where women and girls are able to reach their full potential. Thanks to Oxfam supporters like you, Oxfam focuses on care work through a program called Women's Economic Empowerment and Care (WE-Care). WE-Care funds programs in six countries in Southeast Asia and Africa and provides a framework for programs in 25 additional countries, enabling communities to assess how care is provided, identify problems, develop context-specific solutions, and influence policy.

Read more about how you're helping women around the world achieve equality.

Care work like Arlene's is crucial to our societies and to the economy. This includes looking after children, the elderly, and people with disabilities as well as domestic work like cleaning, cooking, and household chores. Women undertake three quarters of all unpaid care work, adding up to 12.5 billion hours of work every single day. If we valued unpaid care work globally the same as other work, it would be worth nearly $11 trillion a year.

While the world's richest gathered last month in Davos, Switzerland, we know that the Oxfam community was focused on the extreme economic inequality around the world and solving the issues that keep that inequality in place – like recognizing unpaid care work. Together, we're supporting women's economic and social empowerment to overcome long-held and deeply-entrenched gender prejudices that prevent us all from achieving true progress.

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