By Guillermo Cejudo Ramírez

Research professor at the
Public Administration Division-CIDE

How to put childcare discussions, the reactions and functioning of successor programs, into public policy perspective. This premise serves to clarify the importance of research and the current discussion about the care system. In Mexico, as in other Latin American countries, there is a lively and intense discussion about the construction of care systems.

But I have the impression that, sometimes, there's something abstract called a comprehensive care system that needs to be in place, but we forget the fine-grained, substantive discussion, from public policy and from people's experiences, about what a care system means, why it matters, and what the standards of discussion are for building it.

This discussion can only take place through empirical research on how programs work, what happens in homes when these programs exist or cease to exist, and how those responsible for providing care services to different populations demand public policies. Otherwise, I fear it's very easy for governments and politicians to turn things around and say: anything is a care system. This has been the experience of several governments and several countries, and I think it's important to have evidence of what care means in practice and what the standards of discussion are within that logic.

My perspective is one of public policy and is distinct from the discussions currently in vogue in the legislature and among lawyers about the legal and constitutional framework essential to guaranteeing the right to care and charting the course for building a care system. Of course, it is also complementary to, but distinct from, the discussions that specialists and feminists have about women's economic empowerment, gender inequalities, and so on. And it is also distinct from highly technical discussions about the conditions under which specific populations require care—people with disabilities, the elderly, and, of course, children and adolescents.

I'll talk from a public policy perspective, which is recognizing that when we talk about care, we're talking about what in the literature we call complex problems that require integrated policies. To this end, I'll focus on three ideas.

The care crisis is a complex problem

The first is that there is a care crisis, which is a complex problem, to which the response is usually fragmented. So we have a multidimensional problem with many facets and variants, but the response is usually: "Here's a very concentrated policy that addresses one of those facets or one of those populations." On the contrary, solving a complex problem requires integrating policies from different sectors, and that's why we talk about a care system, which isn't good in and of itself or just a fad. Why do we talk about a comprehensive care system? Because it's the only way to articulate different government interventions around people's care needs. Why is care a public program, and what is the State's responsibility? Because there is a social organization of care that shows how families, families and the market, and the community and the State distribute the responsibilities, burden, and time of care in a society. But, although all actors clearly share responsibility, it is the State that shapes the social organization of care, sometimes through the rights it recognizes or the public services it provides or fails to provide. But it also directly influences the regulation of the labor market or social security, and even interventions such as the design of public spaces.

The actions and inactions of the State, even in seemingly unrelated matters, impact care needs. Many government decisions, even if not based on a care-related logic, end up affecting the way households can or should handle care, and that's why we're talking about a care crisis.

Thus, a care crisis is precisely the inability of societies today to guarantee quality care for all those who require it, but also to ensure that care does not become an onerous burden on families, or that it almost always impacts the well-being of women, mothers, sisters, or grandmothers, in order to provide or receive quality care.

This care crisis reinforces gender inequalities, because the burden of care is distributed and falls disproportionately on women, but it also shapes career opportunities. The 2024 Nobel Prize winner in Economics's contribution is precisely that: the career paths of women and men, when they have the same education and equivalent conditions, more or less remain the same until they have children. But, as soon as they have children, even if they have the same education and talent, the career paths of households completely change.

But this care crisis also replicates income inequalities. Having to pay for or purchase care services on the market for a household in the first two income deciles is not the same as having to pay for or purchase care services in the last two income deciles.

And finally, this care crisis affects the exercise of other rights: we are condemning adolescents and young women to assume caregiving responsibilities in their homes instead of attending school; we are stifling women's full personal development; we are limiting the educational trajectories of boys and girls who, lacking quality care in their first 1,000 days, 3 years, etc., are struggling to successfully integrate into formal education.

Solving a complex problem requires integrating policies from various sectors

A second idea is about the burden of care and what the cost of unpaid work means in households, which varies depending on their poverty status. Even if we value the economic contribution equally, that economic contribution must be compared with the income of those households.

Furthermore, every decision by the State to activate or close public spaces imposes a cost on households in terms of time and care. These decisions ultimately burden households and have costs. Each decision replicates and reinforces inequalities.

Therefore, the response to a care crisis in a system or a complex public problem requires building a care system that adapts to each person's circumstances and, in addition, adapts to the country's structural conditions.

Therefore, a well-calibrated definition of the public program is needed, specifying the interventions needed to effectively address it and then identifying which government agencies should be involved and the people whose actions should be targeted. The more complex a problem is—that is, the more factors that generate it—the more interventions and government agencies will be needed to address it. That's why there is no system dependent on a single agency. This has happened in Uruguay and Chile, where progress is already being made. In Colombia, it's not a single agency that creates its care system; it's the coordination of different agencies, secretariats, and ministries that connect programs to adapt them to the different and changing needs of people.

Therefore, the discussion on care issues should not focus solely on the abstract question of whether or not we need a system or a law that says a system is required. What we need is to very precisely operationalize these rights to care and to be cared for.

Caregiving today is precarious work. For a long time, providing care could be funded by the government, but having no access to social security, no job security, and being undervalued in the market is something that must change if we want everything else to work, because we cannot conceive of a care system based on precariousness.

The regulatory challenge of a care system is how we ensure that a person receives the care they need based on their specific characteristics. Government provision is how we move from isolated interventions to the integrated provision of care services around a single person. It's a difficult discussion at times.

When a government announces it will distribute another scholarship, a transfer to individuals, or a subsidy for children, it seems like a bad idea, but it does make a difference in the lives of those who receive it, especially when it's money. But the question is how this contributes to building a coordinated approach and a discussion about the care system, because one thing that has happened is that federal, state, and municipal governments have found a very easy way to implement social programs and convert everything into monetary transfers, clearly affecting the social organization of care.

A comprehensive system requires a design that articulates government interventions around people's care needs.

The third idea is that a care system must articulate the entire care policy and orient it toward the specific characteristics of each person. But in addition to the regulatory aspect of recognizing the right to receive and provide care, which is currently stuck in the legislative process, each identified gap must be progressively closed. Of course, no one expects this to happen automatically, because no country has managed to close every gap overnight, but we do have to understand that there is a need, that there are specific populations in precarious conditions, and that's where we should start.

What is the timeframe for implementing a care system? The federal government announced that it's a progressive system, and it certainly can't be any other way. But what does progressive mean? Does it mean that it will reach a certain point by the end of the six-year term, or does it have a timeframe of 50 years? Because every day we delay guaranteeing care, especially for early childhood, we are sowing inequalities that this population will have to bear for their entire lives.

How will it be financed if there's no budget? No matter how many times we change the Constitution, it won't make a difference, and what will the governance model be? More important is that we change the policy design standards by which we evaluate policy design. Let's not say that a monetary transfer is better than no transfer, or that a program that reaches two cities is better than a program that reaches no one. That's a very low standard. So, the question we have to ask about public policies is how it changes the social organization of care. Providing transfers to older people, to women aged 60 to 64, is a recognition of what has already happened, but does it change the social organization of care? No, does it defeminize it? No, does it defamiliarize it? No, does it decommodify it? No, is it the best option to try to change how the care crisis affects the population today? These are the questions we should ask ourselves when designing public policies, along with how to close the existing gaps, because today they are terribly unequal. And finally, something that is inevitable and that we must understand is that every public policy coexists with others.

To conclude, a final question arises: how will the policy you are launching today coexist with the policies already in place? Does it reinforce their objectives or counteract them? When you create a childcare program and then eliminate it, how will that affect other programs? How will that contribute to the objectives of other public policies? And how will the overall institutional offerings that comprise that system be modified, seeking to change the social organization of caregiving in Mexico today, which is unjust, unequal, and imposes disproportionate burdens on women?

M. Cejudo, Guillermo. (May 2025). “Comprehensive Care System in Mexico: A Public Policy Perspective” [Presentation Summary]. El Colegio de la Frontera Norte. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w7PIvACZSWQ