From 14 – 16 September 2016, the UN Women Training Centre jointly with the UN Women Country Office in Viet Nam delivered a training workshop on care economy and gender equality to more than 40 national partners from the government, civil society organizations, and UN agencies in Viet Nam. The 3-day training workshop aimed to enhance awareness, knowledge and understanding among policy makers, practitioners, and researchers in Viet Nam on the critical place that unpaid care work occupies in development and on the importance to recognize, reduce and redistribute the unequal burden of care work on women. The training equipped the audience with skills and tools for analyzing and identifying types of interventions and policies for a fair and equal social organization of care.

Viet Nam’s National Strategy for Gender Equality 2011-2020 includes a target to “reduce women’s time involvement in household duties by two times by 2015 and 1.5 times by 2020 as compared to men’s” under its objective to ensure gender equality in family life. However, there is a lack of national indicators that identify inequalities in housework burdens as well as on monitoring progress on this. UN Women Country Office in Viet Nam is leading the work on care in the region. Care was recognized at Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995, but has not progressed as fast as other areas of work to promote women’s rights. With the SDGs and Beijing+20, care is gaining the momentum once again. The UN Women Country Office in Viet Nam is certainly in the lead in advancing this agenda.

The participants’ increased knowledge on the questions relating to care, care and domestic work, and care economy will help advancing the agenda to address care problems as one of many strategies to promote gender equality and women’s empowerment in Viet Nam. This group of participants is the first cohort in the country that has undergone a training on care economy, and will serve as a resource group for policy and programme dialogues to promote fair and equal social organization of care and domestic work.

This course is based on the UN Women Training Centre online moderated course entitled “Why We Care about Care” which runs annually.