I graduated from the University of Florida with a baby in hand, entering adulthood with a clarity most of my peers couldn’t imagine. They were walking into the workforce looking for purpose. I was walking into corporate America looking for childcare. Not because I lacked ambition, but because ambition without support is a trap.
When I entered the formal workforce as a young Black mother, the disconnect was glaring. The workplace was built for a worker with no caregiving responsibilities – a worker who has someone else at home doing the cooking, cleaning, nursing, soothing, scheduling, and emotional management. That worker was almost always imagined as a man, and the invisible caregiver was almost always a woman.
During two decades working for major Fortune 100 companies, I saw that families are not failing, systems are. Parents are not overwhelmed because they don’t try hard enough – they are overwhelmed because care infrastructure does not exist. This experience planted the seed for everything I now build: platforms and institutions that centre care as a public good, not a private burden.
Designing solutions from lived experience
I founded The Care Gap, an editorial and content creation platform that aims to elevate the care conversation globally. I set out to change the global narrative, to reveal the invisible labour that structures society, and to advocate for policies, companies and governments to see care as foundational infrastructure.
I also started Caring Africa, an organisation accelerating the care economy in Africa. I believe that Africa is well positioned to lead a global wave of care innovation, because we are still building the structures that already exist in many other places. We have the opportunity to build them differently.
My work with The Care Gap and Caring Africa didn’t come from theory. It came from survival. Growing up in Lagos, Nigeria, I was the firstborn daughter – a position that, in many African households, carries its own unofficial job description: unpaid caregiver-in-chief, coordinator, fixer, emotional anchor. My initiation into care wasn’t gentle or gradual. At 13, I stepped in to raise my younger siblings while navigating adolescence myself.
I learned early what most policymakers still fail to grasp: care is labour. It is responsibility. It is time. My life taught me that the world cannot keep outsourcing the care economy to women and calling it “culture”.
In Africa, however, centuries of rigid gender norms are not yet fully baked into our GDP models. We can choose differently, by modernising gender roles as we modernise our economies. With our youth, flexibility, and ongoing nation building, Africa can build a caring economy, not merely a capitalist one.
We need economies that value care
Nobel-winning economist Claudia Goldin offers a powerful warning about what happens when countries modernise their economies without also modernising gender norms. Giving examples from Asia (Korea and Japan) and southern Europe (Italy, Spain, Portugal and Greece), she shows how fertility declined from around three children per woman to barely one, in less than two decades.[1][2] Why? Because women’s opportunities changed, but men’s expectations stayed the same.
DeSmith, C. (2025) Need to boost population? Encourage dads to step up at home. The Harvard Gazette, 27 January. Available at: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2025/01/need-to-boost-population-encourage-dads-to-step-up-at-home/ (accessed January 2026).
Goldin, C. (2025) Babies and the macroeconomy. Working paper 33311. National Bureau of Economic Research. Available at: https://www.nber.org/papers/w3331 (accessed January 2026).
Goldin puts it simply when she says that girls suddenly see new possibilities, but boys still inherit the benefits of the traditional home. When economic horizons open up for women, but care is still seen as their responsibility alone, women choose later motherhood, fewer children, or no children at all.
Goldin’s research also reveals the solution, for countries that want to modernise economically without experiencing a collapse in fertility: venerate fatherhood. Create policies that pull men into care, not push women further into exhaustion. Men who share care increase fertility, partnership stability, and wellbeing.
Africa can lead the creation of the care economy
Africa can learn this now, before repeating the same mistakes. We are not yet locked into the gendered care crisis that many wealthier nations are trying to reverse. Our economies are still forming. Our workplaces are still evolving. We are not repairing a broken system, we are designing a functioning one.
We have the opportunity to redefine gender roles, normalising men as caregivers and elevating care as valuable, skilled work. At Caring Africa, we imagine an Africa where the informal care sector becomes professional, dignified employment; governments invest in care infrastructure and public–private care ecosystems; and workplaces are designed to work for real families.
From my journey of caring for siblings at 13 in Lagos, to graduating university with a baby, to navigating corporate America as a young mother, I saw what others couldn’t see: care isn’t a “women’s issue”. Care is the infrastructure that makes every other system possible. And that realisation is what fuels my vision for Africa.
Care shapes everything: opportunity, ambition, health, identity, economic possibility, and dignity. You cannot talk about economic productivity, development, mobility or innovation without talking about care. We can build a caring economy, not an extractive one. This is not sentimental. It is strategic. It is visionary. It is economically sound. And it is urgent.
Care is the first economy. We ignore it at our peril. Africa has the chance to acknowledge this truth earlier than Western nations – and to build something new, equitable, culturally grounded, and future-facing. If we get this right, Africa won’t just “catch up”, Africa will lead. We will show the world what becomes possible when care, not exploitation, is the foundation of society.
