To mark International Women’s Day this year, our Senior Strategic Research Partner Victoria Olarte reflects on the costs and pressures that women absorb in holding families together, especially in times of conflict.
The care we don’t see
I am reminded every day that care is not a soft word. It’s a force – often invisible – that holds families steady. And although care sits at the centre of children’s wellbeing, it exists within structures that don’t always recognise or support the people carrying most of it.
On International Women’s Day, it feels important to look beyond celebration, and pay attention to the quiet, unseen work that keeps families together. The care carried largely, though not only, by women, shaped by gendered expectations, and stretched further still in times of crisis. In every context we work in, women’s daily decisions absorb strain long before childcare and protection systems respond – and those pressures grow sharper still when conflict disrupts everything around them.
How gender shapes the load
Across many societies, care is still treated as something women are expected to do – at home, in communities, and within formal care systems. These expectations shape who takes responsibility when services fall short and who absorbs the stress of family instability. Society has long organised care around women – often without the power, security or recognition that should accompany such responsibility. And when factors like domestic violence, stigma or financial dependency push women further to the margins, family stability can falter. In some contexts, the threat of separation or institutionalisation is even used as a form of coercion against women who fall outside accepted norms.
And while women often carry the greatest share of caregiving, gender shapes care in different ways – for women, for men, and for children – with no single experience defining them all. These dynamics do not tell a single story – but they do reveal how gender can shape vulnerability long before families come into contact with child protection systems.
In our work at Hope and Homes for Children, we see the same pattern across countries: women are often the first to absorb strain, and the last to be offered support. It appears in the quiet, everyday ways they stretch to keep children safe when resources, time or services are limited. In Rwanda, adolescent mothers told us that they felt isolated by stigma with almost no socially acceptable pathway into parenthood. In South Africa, mothers living in high‑violence communities carry the dual weight of caregiving and navigating daily risk. We see it when a mother delays her own health needs because food must come first, when a grandmother steps in to care for children with disabilities in the absence of specialist services, or when a woman living with domestic violence hesitates to seek help for fear of losing her children. None of these women lack commitment. What they often lack is the margin to withstand one more shock. By the time a family reaches crisis point, the warning signs have usually been there for a long time – carried largely by the women holding everything together.
When conflict exposes and deepens inequalities
This year, International Women’s Day comes at a time when conflict is rife across the world. Fighting has escalated in parts of the Middle East: families are facing increasing danger, displacement and loss, and children are caught in increasingly dangerous environments. Today, more than 470 million children globally live in conflict affected areas. Across the Middle East today, as in Ukraine over the past four years, conflict exposes and deepens existing inequalities – especially the gendered pressures around care – and turns fragile care and protection systems into failing systems.
In Ukraine, I have heard women describe a strain that settles deep in the body. Waking to sirens. Keeping children calm through hours in shelters. Managing blackouts that last up to 20 hours, disrupting water, heat and communication. Holding family life together while partners serve or are displaced. Making decisions through exhaustion, grief and uncertainty. The caregiving they were doing before the war has not changed – but the environment around them has become profoundly heavier, and even basic needs can be hard to meet. The line between a family staying together and a family separating often rests on a woman who is carrying more than anyone should have to manage alone.
Holding a family together in wartime
Oksana, a mother of three, found herself at that edge. Her husband was serving on the frontline in Ukraine, unreachable. She was pregnant in a war, holding her children steady through air raids and blackouts. By the time she reached the maternity hospital, exhaustion had accumulated into doubt: How will I do this with four children? Am I enough for them in conditions like these?
A hospital worker noticed. She called one of our case managers. What Oksana needed most was someone who could listen without judgement and lighten the load she had been carrying alone. The case manager stayed with her, helped her navigate birth registration and social benefits, arranged essential supplies, and ensured she did not leave the hospital alone.
Oksana went home with her baby not because the context changed, but because she wasn’t left alone inside it.
Conflict preparedness begins with families
Oksana’s story is just one window into a much wider reality – because while she had someone to turn to, many women in conflict do not. And as instability deepens, the pressures around them multiply: caregiving intensifies, family networks fracture, and the pathways that once kept children safe narrow or disappear altogether. Conflict drives separation, accelerates institutionalisation, and creates humanitarian blind spots in which children in residential care become invisible, weakly protected and highly exploitable.
In conflict, one of the greatest risks is the children we don’t see – those inside residential institutions who fall outside the reach of humanitarian systems. When movement becomes dangerous or impossible, institutions remain in place, and so do the children inside them. Facilities that were already unsafe in peacetime quickly become perilous: safeguards collapse, staffing thins, supplies run out, and children – especially those with disabilities – may be left behind or exposed to danger, trafficking and exploitation. What causes harm in peacetime becomes life‑threatening in war – and even more devastating knowing that around 80 percent of children in orphanages are not orphans: they have families who want them home.
This is why conflict preparedness cannot be limited to physical infrastructure or emergency logistics. It must recognise the women who carry most of the daily care work – and who shoulder even more when crisis unfolds. Real preparedness means strong families, supported caregiving, and the systems that keep children connected to the adults who love them: reliable case management, functioning social protection, disability‑inclusive services, and a workforce that can reach families even when everything around them feels unstable. When these structures are in place – and when a mother has someone to call who can activate them – the risk of separation drops dramatically. This is what allows care systems to hold under pressure. Care system reform isn’t something to bolt on to emergency response – or worse, delay until peace returns; it’s the backbone of child protection – the foundation that reduces vulnerability before conflict, and supports families long after the crisis has passed.
What young women ask of us – and what this day asks of all of us
Across our youth-led spaces, young women have been calling for something very specific: accountability. Not symbolic consultation or polite listening – but real responsiveness. A place where what they say leads to change, and where speaking honestly does not put them at risk. Their clarity has sharpened my own thinking: working with women and girls is not just about hearing them; it is about being answerable to them.
International Women’s Day often celebrates women’s strength – and rightly so. But it must also turn our attention to what their resilience is asked to carry, its cost, and to the systems that make survival harder than it should ever be. It asks us to look honestly at how societies value care, and at the people who provide it, receive it, or rely on it – and to respond.
Care isn’t infinite. It’s shaped by opportunity, support, recognition and stability. When those supports fail, families fracture. When they are present, families rebuild – even under conditions of profound strain.
Oksana’s steadiness reminds us of women’s strength, absolutely – but it also reminds us that care is not a private matter. What her story makes clear – and what I have seen repeatedly in my work across Africa, Latin America and Eastern Europe over two decades – is that families stay together when the environments around them are designed to help them do so. Gender‑sensitive care reform is the everyday work of ensuring women, men, girls and boys have what they need to stay connected to the relationships that help them grow.
And conflict only heightens the stakes. Countries that enter crisis with strong family and alternative care systems cope better, while those that rely on institutions face sharper breakdowns when conflict hits. Preparedness begins long before the first siren sounds – in the strength of families, in the stability of caregivers, and in the systems that surround them. When social protection works, when case management reaches families early, when disability‑inclusive services exist close to home, when fathers are supported to share care, and when mothers are not isolated by fear or stigma, families have the resilience to withstand shocks.
These are not emergency measures. They’re the foundations that ensure children remain with the adults who love them when crisis hits. If we want families to withstand shocks, care systems must be built for resilience, not for emergencies alone.
If we’re serious about women’s lives – and children’s lives – we must be serious about care. Not because care belongs to women, but because strengthening care strengthens everyone – in peace, and especially in conflict.
