South Africa has the world’s highest inequality in income and wealth distribution — 90% of South African earners receive only 35% of all income (World Population Review, 2024). Moreover, these disparities are strongly associated with race and gender. Additionally, unemployment remains high at 32.1% (Stats SA, 2024). Colonial and apartheid histories, legacies of racialized segregation and spatialization, gendered discrimination, and employment exclusion mean that black, low-income women are the most marginalized in earning a living.

In South Africa, 42% of households are women-headed, and women perform most of the unpaid care work, including mothering, with little support and in conditions of mass poverty, food insecurity, and infrastructure failures. Care work is rendered invisible and normalized as women’s work. These patriarchal gender norms create unrealistic expectations and demands for mothers. Mothering is judged by family, neighbors, and the community against impossible standards (G’sell, 2020), maintaining gender inequality and resulting in negative effects on children, women, the economy, and the overall development of South Africa (Posel & Hall, 2021).

To understand the burdens carried by low-income mothers and find sustainable policy solutions to recognize and reduce it, our trans-disciplinary team used a multi-stage, participatory action research approach. We used photovoice and arts-based methodologies to illuminate the lived realities of twelve black, low-income mothers, recognizing them as co-researchers and as experts of their precarious contexts. We collaborated with mothers themselves, civil society partners, and the provincial government to co-create sustainable pathways to improve the quality of low-income South African mothers’ lives and livelihoods.

The first stage in 2023, culminating in a series of photovoice exhibitions to civil society and policy-makers, revealed a care work crisis. The exhibitions spotlighted mothers’ harsh realities and they shared their calls to action. It foregrounded intersecting challenges of hunger, barriers to employment, poor healthcare, sanitation and housing services, lack of support from fathers and men, and unsafe environments caused by infrastructural failures and gang-related, gender-based, and sexual violence. These factors compounded low-income mothers’ struggles to earn and care. We termed this burden “The Motherload”. It describes the highly gendered, often invisible, under-valued work that individuals performing mothering undertake, which hinders their economic security, safety, and well-being.

Our concept of “The Motherload” differs from current, Global North framings of childcare, mental load and cognitive labor (Reich-Stiebert et al., 2023), which focus on individual-level strains, such as planning and remembering. Rather, “The Motherload” acknowledges the historical, social, and economic factors that create, complicate, and perpetuate care burdens. For example, mothers want to earn to provide a better life for their families, but legacies of apartheid spatial planning mean that jobs are located far from their communities, entailing long, unpredictable, and expensive commutes. Simultaneously, the lack of affordable, quality childcare means that mothers need to be close to home to look after children in conditions of considerable hazard, both social (e.g., gangs, bullying) and physical (e.g., busy roads, lack of safe space). Low-income mothers struggled to find ways to meet both the economic and practical needs of their households while adhering to societal prescriptions of a good mother.

“The Motherload” is intensified by the lack of support and involvement from fathers or male partners in child-rearing and household responsibilities. This is an enduring remainder of apartheid and colonial legacies, especially of the migrant labor system. Mothers identified male participation as crucial in growing awareness of and ultimately redistributing care burdens. The second stage of this project (2024 and 2025), continues working with the mothers and expands to include low-income fathers, again using participatory action research to deepen recognition of “The Motherload”, understand fathers’ perspectives on care, and highlight barriers to fathers’ involvement in care work.

Our design includes iterative stakeholder engagements to reflect on and share our emergent findings with policy and civil society partners and other interested parties, ensuring that the mothers’ voices remain central. This approach has initiated a shift in the recognition by our partners of mothers as knowledge experts who can contribute to policy and program design and development. It has also reflected changes in policy-making, involving a diverse range of stakeholders to maximize impact. It has developed pathways for our policy partners to embed a people-centered approach in external service delivery and internal governance, to ensure that policies achieve more appropriate and impactful outcomes.

The work has had meaningful impact in deepening understanding of public policy issues by foregrounding lived realities amid broader structural constraints. For example, highlighting hidden costs of infrastructure failures, such as inadequate sanitation, that creates care work struggles and reduces mothers’ available time to engage in economic activity. Attention to these care realities has revealed the limitations of policies developed on quantitative data to address unemployment and unpaid care work in a highly unequal society. Our policy partners have recognized that reliance on quantitative data alone overlooks the complexities of “The Motherload,” and fails to recognize the ways that siloed policy-making creates and compounds care difficulties – especially for black low-income women.

Our policy partners have actively changed their approaches as a result of this collaborative work. This work clearly demonstrated that when research centers marginalized people and their realities, grounding broad statistical trends in their experiences of communities, policy recommendations can be more contextually relevant and potentially more effective. Further, by highlighting the complex dynamics in the care economy, revealing how poverty constrains care options and economic participation for mothers, the research has prompted a more holistic examination of grants, programs, and services.

References

G’sell, B. (2020). Multiple maternities: performative motherhood and support seeking in South Africa. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 46(1), 3-29.

Posel, D. and Hall, K. (2021) The economics of households in South Africa, in A. Oqubay, F. Tregenna and I. Valodia (eds) The Oxford Handbook of the South African Economy, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp 800–22.

Reich-Stiebert, N., Froehlich, L. & Voltmer, J.B. (2023). Gendered mental labor: A systematic literature review on the cognitive dimension of unpaid work within the household and childcare. Sex Roles, 88, pages 475–494. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11199-023-01362-0

StatsSA. (November, 2024). Statistics South Africa on official unemployment rate in third quarter of 2024. Retrieved: https://www.gov.za/news/media-statements/statistics-south-africa-official-unemployment-rate-third-quarter-2024-12-nov#:~:text=The%20official%20unemployment%20rate%20was,persons%20to%208%2C0%20million.

World Population Review (2024). Wealth Inequality by Country 2024. Retrieved:
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/wealth-inequality-by-country

Acknowledgments

We acknowledge other members of The Motherload project (in alphabetical order): Jane Battersby, Sarah Chapman, Carren Duffy, Feranaaz Farista, Ruth Mathys and Flourish, Lana Rolfe and The School of Hard Knocks, Wanga Zembe, and Yanga Zembe.

This work was carried out with the aid of grant from the University of Cape Town’s Grand Challenges programme, and the International Development Research Centre, Ottawa, Canada, and funded by the Government of Canada.