The International Labour Organization (ILO) views South-South Cooperation (SSC) as a crucial mechanism for driving sustainable development and achieving decent work worldwide. SSC is the mutual exchange of resources, technology, and knowledge between developing nations in the Global South. It operates as a complement to traditional North-South cooperation, guided by principles of solidarity, national ownership, and equality among partners. This framework typically manifests as bilateral agreements, regional alliances, peer-to-peer technical assistance or joint research initiatives. By sharing localized expertise, countries with similar socio-economic realities can co-create practical solutions that are highly adaptable to their unique domestic environments.
Within the care economy, South-South Cooperation provides a powerful platform for countries to share innovative policies that redistribute and recognize unpaid care work, a burden that disproportionately falls on women. Developing nations often face similar structural challenges, such as large informal sectors and inadequate public care infrastructure. Through SSC, governments can replicate successful models.
Care sectors in the Global South are heavily populated by women, many of whom labor in precarious, informal conditions without social protections. Through knowledge-sharing networks, trade unions and labor ministries can exchange best practices on establishing minimum wages, regulating working hours, and enforcing workplace safety for domestic and care workers. Collaboratively strengthening these legal protections transforms vulnerable care jobs into dignified, formal employment, closing the gender pay gap from the bottom up.
This cooperative framework also accelerates capacity building and skills development for the care workforce across developing regions. Countries can co-develop standardized vocational training curricula, certification programs, and professional toolkits tailored to developing market contexts. For instance, a country with an established professional training program for early childhood educators or eldercare providers can export its training modules to a regional peer. Professionalizing the sector elevates the social status of care work, ensures high-quality service delivery, and equips women workers with transferable skills that increase their bargaining power and career mobility.
Finally, South-South Cooperation strengthens global and regional advocacy, allowing countries in the Global South to form a unified front in reshaping international care policies. By pooling empirical data, regional statistics, and cultural insights, these nations can jointly lobby for a fairer global care agenda. This collective voice ensures that global standards on the care economy reflect the economic realities, financial constraints, and demographic shifts of developing countries rather than just Western contexts. Ultimately, SSC transforms the care economy from a source of gender inequality into a pillar of resilient, equitable macro-economic growth across the Global South.
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