This article is written by Vanesa D’Alessandre, Social Protection Programme Principal Researcher, Florencia Caro Sachetti, Social Protection Programme Researcher Associate and Bruno Muñoz, Social Protection Programme Coordinator at CIPPEC, an independent nonprofit organisation that works on building public policies.

  • The problem: One of the biggest challenges for governments seeking to establish a Care System (CS) is creating a common framework that encourages communication and coordination among actors analysing the problem from different perspectives and with the same hierarchy within the government structure.
  • Why it matters: Collaborative work enhances the reach and effectiveness of policies and is a condition for consolidating a CS. We need to develop tools for policy managers to experience the benefits of collaborating with their peers without feeling threatened in their resources and professional identity.
  • The solution: To visualise the contribution that each area makes to the solution of the problem, even if at first, they name the problem differently. The aim is to promote collaborative work through a multidimensional indicator in which each area feels their participation is recognised.

In 2020, the newly established Care Policies Secretariat in the city of Santa Fe, Argentina, enlisted CIPPEC’s support in developing care policies aimed at leveraging the development of children and adolescents while promoting women's economic autonomy. The Care Policies Secretariat recognised that the existing institutional framework often led to misaligned objectives and disjointed actions in addressing the care needs of families. To address this issue, our focus was on bolstering coordination mechanisms across municipal, provincial and national social sectors. A collaboration between CIPPEC and the ‘A Care System for the City of Santa Fe’ project was born.

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Early analysis showed that there is inertia in certain government areas that have learned to work — sometimes with very good results — without connecting with others. In fact, we quickly understood that the authorities and technical teams in each area found no incentives to collaborate and that, if they tried to work with others, they did not know how to. In this sense, the Basic Care Basket (BCB), a synthetic indicator to identify families with children and adolescents facing difficulties in coping with their care duties, is helping us to overcome some of the main obstacles that hinder collaborative work.

More about the Basic Care Basket

The BCB is a synthetic indicator that estimates the cost of producing family care and defines a threshold below which a household is poor in terms of resources to produce quality care. The objective of the BCB project is to guarantee the right to receive and provide quality care and reduce social and gender inequalities.

Harnessing user perspectives to drive collaboration

The BCB brought to light the perspectives of potential care policy users. Through this lens, we underscored that raising children requires access to essential resources — food, shelter, healthcare, education — and alongside unpaid care work, the role is often disproportionately shouldered by women, limiting their economic opportunities. By analysing household caregiving dynamics, we pinpointed the threshold of resources and unpaid work hours at which families could manage without compromising children's development or women's autonomy. Preliminary BCB results for urban areas in Argentina indicated that approximately 60% of households with children faced a resource deficit.

By embracing new perspectives and providing the necessary tools, we can usher in a culture of innovation and collaboration in care policy development.

A detailed analysis of the picture presented by the BCB helped us to shift the attention of authorities and technical teams from sectoralised work practices to a more comprehensive approach that a users' perspective brings. The BCB contributed to gathering actors around a new policy problem: a joint approach to the deficit of resources for raising children in the city of Santa Fe. Under this new perspective, a scenario of shared resources became evident, in which the scope of each care policy addressing the care demands of families with children and adolescents depended on an interconnection with other actors. This first exercise allowed us to discuss the following question: Why not work with others if the effectiveness of my own work depends on this interaction?

Sustaining collaborative efforts through user understanding

Discovering a common framework can ignite the spark of collaborative work but it is not enough to sustain it. Calculating the BCB in the city of Santa Fe was our proposal to strengthen collaborative work among the referents of different areas and authorities. The construction of data collection instruments allowed each area — health, education and social assistance, among others — to systematise care policies aimed at families with children and adolescents. The construction of a database to calculate the BCB allowed them to identify and characterise the population targeted by the CS.

The measurement and analysis of the care deficit families in the city of Santa Fe were facing led authorities and technical teams to design the most appropriate intervention strategies to address it. In all cases, these strategies highlighted the need to strengthen coordination and collaboration mechanisms between different departments.

In summary, CIPPEC’s collaboration with the Care Policies Secretariat of the city of Santa Fe underscored that collaborative work isn't a given — it's cultivated. By embracing new perspectives and providing the necessary tools, we can usher in a culture of innovation and collaboration in care policy development. The Basic Care Basket can contribute to the achievement of that goal.

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(Image credit: Unsplash)