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BOX 3.12Towards a national care system in Uruguay: The role of women’s agencyThe combined actions of women’s organizations, female legislators and feminist academics havebeen central in placing care on the public and political agenda in Uruguay. 234 A network of women’sorganizations—the Red de Género y Familia—and feminist academics began collaborating in the mid-2000s. Together, they forged a common understanding of care from the point of view of gender equalityand human rights, collected data, analysed existing policy frameworks and identified coverage gaps.The results of two time-use surveys, conducted by the National Statistical Institute, the National Women’sAgency and UN Women, provided powerful evidence on the unequal distribution of unpaid care anddomestic work between women and men. They also highlighted other inequalities in access to carebased on income and life course stage. 235In 2008, the Red de Género y Familia organized roundtable discussions in order to bring governmentofficials, civil society organizations and care service providers together to discuss these issues. Thesessions brought the insufficient and fragmented nature of existing care services to the fore, giving riseto the idea of an integrated national care system. Female members of the ruling left-wing party FrenteAmplio successfully placed this idea on the political agenda, such that the Frente Amplio’s re-electionplatform for 2010–2014 included the promise to create a national care system. After the Frente regainedpower, the Government organized 22 debates across the country to ensure broad participation indefining the new system, including by women’s organizations, pensioners, caregivers and their families,programme administrators, service providers and regional and local authorities. The Cabinet approvedthe ensuing proposal for the National Care System in 2011.The proposal is ambitious and explicitly rights-based, with reference to international and regionalconventions and agreements. It is universal in thrust, starting with the most disadvantaged and foreseeingthe progressive expansion of benefits and services. Caregivers, both paid and unpaid, were identifiedas a key target group for government support alongside three groups of care receivers: preschoolchildren, the elderly and people with disabilities. Measures have been proposed to improve the workingconditions and wages of paid care workers and increasing support for unpaid family caregivers. There isalso a commitment to promote a more equal sharing of care responsibilities between women and men,including through awareness-raising campaigns as well as special incentives for hiring male care servicestaff. 236These achievements notwithstanding, the actual implementation of the system’s components has beenslow. One of the key challenges is to place the system on a secure financial footing. In parallel, strategicplanning processes need to be scaled up in order to ensure implementation, including concrete goals,timelines and budgets as well as a clear definition of institutional leadership for different components ofthe system. To achieve these outcomes, civil society coalitions need to keep up the pressure and ensurethat care remains high on the political agenda.177