News
ILO launches project to strengthen social protection for domestic and community-based care workers in Sri Lanka
29 January 2025
Colombo – The International Labour Organization (ILO) has officially launched the Care Project: Creating Decent Work Opportunities for Domestic and Community-Based Care Workers through Transformative Actions for Gender Equality in Sri Lanka. This initiative aims to strengthen the working conditions of domestic and community-based care workers, including social protection, for a largely informal and often overlooked sector of the labour force.
The event brought together a wide variety of stakeholders from various relevant line ministries, development partners, civil society and including ILO’s tripartite constituents: Ministry of Labour, Employers’ Federation of Ceylon and trade unions, underscoring the strong interest to support the advancement of the care economy in Sri Lanka, recognizing it as a critical need for gender equality and responding to the growing demand for care and support
due to an aging population.
The ILO Care Project focuses on three key areas. First, it will develop a social insurance-based maternity benefit scheme. Second, the project will pilot a digital registration system to facilitate the formalization of domestic workers. Lastly, the ILO will collaborate with various partners to organize evidence-based policy dialogues on the care economy to develop a comprehensive action plan that promotes decent work in the care economy.
This initiative marks a significant step toward formalizing and improving working conditions for care workers in Sri Lanka, especially domestic workers, who often lack access to decent work. It also aims to support broad dialogue to promote care policies and services that provide decent work to care workers while also providing care and support to those in need of care. These actions will contribute to Sri Lanka’s efforts to increase women’s labour force participation by addressing the main barrier to them getting in, staying in and advancing in the labour force: their disproportionate share of unpaid care and domestic work.