The hidden subsidy of care

Talk of “polycrisis” has become routine, supercharged by countries in debt distress, ecological breakdown, backlash against gender and rights movements, the rise of a well-networked and well-resourced far right, war, and recurrent commodity and price shocks. 

Feminist political economists have long argued that these crises are not coincidental. Instead, they are produced by a world economy organised around extraction, in which costs flow downward: from states to households, and within households, to the women and girls who carry the disproportionate responsibilities of unpaid care work.

Women working in Zimbabwe’s informal economy offer a look at how this dynamic of extraction plays out. The US and Israel’s war on Iran, the dismantling of USAID, and the use of health financing as leverage all push higher living costs, heavier care responsibilities, and reduced access to healthcare onto women and girls.

Care as the hidden subsidy in a world of recurrent crises under capitalism

Capitalism fundamentally depends on work it does not pay for. As Nancy Fraser argues, the economy free rides on the care, provisioning, and social bonds that keep people alive and “productive” members of the labour force, all while assigning that work no monetary value. The scale of women’s unpaid care work is substantial. Women perform about three-quarters of the world’s unpaid care work, which the ILO values at roughly 9% of global GDP. 

Women’s unpaid care in the Global South is, in effect, a hidden subsidy for production and consumption that largely benefits the Global North. Hickel et al. estimate that the net appropriation from the Global South to the Global North can be valued at US$10.8 trillion from 1990 to 2015, an amount that is 70x what is needed to end extreme poverty. In an extractive system in which Global South countries have limited sovereignty to mobilise domestic resources and invest in public services, women and girls provide the unpaid care work that reproduces a workforce whose underpaid labour and resources flow northward at scale. 

In times of crisis, that hidden subsidy deepens. During Global North-imposed structural adjustment, Diane Elson showed that cuts to public services in Global South countries shifted care costs onto women’s unpaid time, especially women living in poverty. Research across 17 countries during the 2008-2011 food, fuel, and financial crises found the same pattern. Women acted as shock absorbers by stretching household budgets, walking farther for food and fuel, and taking on more precarious paid work while their unpaid workload grew, all to maintain their families’ living standards. Where states cannot cushion shocks, women's time therefore becomes the social protection system of last resort.

Zimbabwe’s informal economy

Zimbabwe has one of the world's largest informal economies, accounting for around 60.4% of GDP. No precise figures exist on the gender makeup of the informal sector, but many sources indicate that women make up the majority of informal workers in Zimbabwe, including 64% of women in the rural informal sector. This reflects global patterns showing that women comprise a greater proportion of informal sector workers in developing countries, the opposite of what occurs in developed and emerging economies.

These structural dynamics are partially a legacy of Northern-imposed structural adjustment. Zimbabwe entered independence in 1980 with a relatively diversified economy. In 1991, on the advice of the IMF and World Bank, it adopted the Economic Structural Adjustment Programme (ESAP), which mandated trade liberalisation and cuts in public spending. Formal employment contracted rapidly, and a women-dominated informal sector grew. Women in the formal sector were among the hardest hit, as liberalisation was especially detrimental to women-dominated sectors hit by the influx of cheaper Asian goods, including textiles, clothing, and footwear. As a result, women increasingly turned to informal activities such as cross-border trading and street vending to compensate for declining income.

For many women and girls, participation in the informal sector is inseparable from their care responsibilities. For instance, women may choose street vending or home-based work so that they can watch their children while they trade or make goods, fitting their care obligations around care the state fails to provide. In conditions of crisis, however, care responsibilities can become a disadvantage. During the 2008-09 global financial crisis, WIEGO found that men who lost formal sector work and moved into informal work competed with the advantage of being free from unpaid care responsibilities. 

Shocks from abroad: fuel prices and health financing

Fuel. The US and Israel launched their war on Iran on 28 February 2026. Because of supply chain disruptions, in March 2026 the Zimbabwe Energy Regulatory Authority raised petrol prices by 38% and diesel by 34% from the previous month. This triggered an immediate rise in public transport fares, which rose by 50-100%.

For street-vending mothers, higher transport prices increased the cost of care. A representative of a vendors' and traders' organisation told us that women faced a choice between paying to take their children to and from school and keeping their businesses going. Vending mothers have long organised rotating childcare to cover peak after-school trading hours, collectively carrying a cost the state will not. As fuel costs climb, the arrangements have become harder to sustain.

Health. For decades, the United States was Zimbabwe's largest bilateral health donor. After the US dismantled USAID—eliminating several critical health programmes for Zimbabwe, particularly for HIV/AIDS—Washington offered Zimbabwe a five-year, US$367 million health package covering HIV, tuberculosis, malaria, and maternal and child health. However, the ​​offer was conditioned on access to Zimbabwean biological samples and health data for research and commercial use, with no commitment to share resulting vaccines or treatments. Zimbabwe made its rejection public in February 2026, and the US announced it would wind down its health assistance.

Harare thus faced an impossible choice: accept an extractive deal or let a chronically underfunded health system deteriorate further. The costs of the second option fall first onto women, and even more so for women in the informal sector who have less access to healthcare in the first place. As public care recedes, women and girls take on the care of dependents with illnesses and disabilities, lose access to care for themselves, and face deeper economic insecurity.

What is to be done?

The shocks are externally driven, but so too are the limits on how Zimbabwe can respond: debt service, illicit financial flows, investor-state arbitration, and global trade rules all constrain the fiscal sovereignty needed to fund public services that would allow women in the informal economy to withstand crises. 

Global North governments and international financial institutions, which hold the most resources and the most power over these rules, should cancel unpayable debt without austerity conditions, provide health financing free of demands for data and biological samples, back a strong UN tax convention to stem illicit flows, abandon investor-state dispute settlement, and restore the trade policy space needed to rebuild decent work for women. 

Until public systems of care are funded to absorb shocks, women’s unpaid care will continue to act as a hidden subsidy for an extractive system that generates crisis after crisis.

Arimbi Wahono is a manager at social and environmental research consultancy Shared Planet, where she leads the Just Transition practice. Her expertise lies in feminist and international political economy, with a focus on global economic governance as it relates to trade, tax, debt, and multilateral processes. She holds an MSc in Comparative Political Economy from the London School of Economics and Political Science, as well as a BA (Joint Honours) in Development Studies and Political Science from McGill University.