The care economy raises a huge range of problems and opportunities for governments, but one issue that is more or less constant across the world is the uneven distribution of unpaid care work: this tends to fall far more on women.

As populations age, countries around the globe are beginning to focus attention on unpaid caregivers. Such people typically spend hours each day bathing, feeding, and helping an elderly or disabled relative. Often, they undermine their own health and career to take care of a loved one.

In January 2017, President Anthony Carmona swore in Nikoli Edwards, age 25, as the youngest temporary senator in Trinidad and Tobago’s history. “I have been very much involved in piecing together the puzzle when it comes to how we develop the holistic young person in Trinidad and Tobago,” said Senator Nikoli Edwards in a Wilson Center interview with Roger-Mark De Souza, a Wilson Center Global Fellow, on Edwards’s personal journey into youth advocacy and the importance of engaging young people in decision-making.

“Adolescence is a time to support young peoples’ access to information, to education, to skills and to services that can result in a healthy and safe transition into adulthood,” said Sarah Barnes, Project Director of the Maternal Health Initiative, at a recent Wilson Center event on engaging youth and protecting their sexual and reproductive health and rights. “It’s time to make adolescents a priority,” said Barnes.

This summer, Iraqi citizens in Basra demonstrated in the streets to protest a serious public health crisis caused by polluted water. The condition of their water infrastructure was deplorable after years of devastating wars, corruption, and droughts and regional hydropolitics. More than 100,000 people have reportedly been poisoned by polluted water, while recent estimates warn that some 277,000 children are at risk of diseases, such as cholera due to rundown water and sanitation facilities at schools.

This year, “we went from 815 million people food insecure to 821 million—for the third year in a row increasing,” said Ambassador Ertharin Cousin, referencing the latest State of Food Insecurity and Nutrition Report in a recent Smart Women, Smart Power conversation held at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Ambassador Cousin served as executive director of the World Food Program between 2012 and 2017, and before that, she served as executive vice president and chief operating officer of America’s Second Harvest, now known as Feeding America.

“I don’t wanna work anymore,” the comedian Ali Wong exclaimed in front of her audience on her recent Netflix stand-up show — she was heavily pregnant at the time. “Well, I don’t wanna lean in, OK? I wanna lie down,” she added, referring to Lean In, the iconic career advice book for women. The crowd roared with laughter.