For many Nigerian women, the workday begins before the paid workday does. There are children to prepare for school, meals to make, clothes to wash, elderly relatives to look after and sick family members who need care. Some women do this alongside paid employment. Others reduce their working hours, turn down opportunities or leave paid work because there is nobody else to provide the care.
None of this necessarily comes with a payslip. But it takes time, and Nigeria’s latest time-use data shows just how unevenly that time is distributed.
Nigeria’s 2024 Time Use Survey, conducted by the National Bureau of Statistics, found that people aged 15 and above in the four states covered by the survey, Borno, Cross River, Kaduna and Lagos, spent an average of three hours a day on unpaid domestic and care work.
The gender difference was significant. Women spent about 21% of their day, roughly five hours, on unpaid domestic and care work, compared with 4.1% for men, or about one hour. Women also spent more time on both unpaid domestic work and unpaid caregiving. Overall, women in the four surveyed states spent about five times as much time as men on unpaid domestic and care work.
The figures do not represent every Nigerian woman. The survey was designed to provide estimates for the four selected states, not the entire country. But it provides something that has often been missing from discussions about women’s economic participation: a way of measuring the time women spend doing work that does not necessarily appear in employment statistics.
And that matters because unpaid care is connected to the wider economy. Someone has to look after children before their parents can go to work. Someone has to care for an elderly relative when they can no longer live independently. Someone has to stay home when a family member becomes sick.
When that responsibility falls disproportionately on women, it can affect what they are able to do outside the home. A woman who spends several hours every day providing unpaid care has less time available for paid employment, education, entrepreneurship, rest or community participation. For some women, care responsibilities can influence whether they take a job at all, whether they can work full-time or whether they have to turn down an opportunity.
This is why unpaid care is increasingly being discussed as an economic policy issue rather than simply a private family matter.
Nigeria is beginning to put care on the policy agenda
In May 2026, the Federal Government declared the care economy a national priority at the National Caregivers Summit in Abuja.
The Ministry of Women Affairs and Social Development said it wanted to move caregiving away from being treated solely as an unpaid domestic responsibility and towards a more structured sector, including training and professionalisation of care workers. Government officials also linked the burden of unpaid care on women and girls to their participation in education, employment and economic life.
In September, the government held a national consultation on the draft National Care Policy, bringing together government, development partners, the private sector, academia and civil society to discuss a national framework for care. The consultation focused on how care could be organised, supported and recognised as part of Nigeria’s development infrastructure.
The emerging policy conversation includes areas such as childcare, care for older people and people with disabilities, professional care workers, social protection and support for families.
That represents an important policy shift. But recognition is only the first step. The bigger question is what recognition will actually change for the woman who currently provides most of the care in her household.
But unpaid care is only half the story
There is another side to the care economy: people whose paid work involves caring for others. Domestic workers, childcare workers, cleaners, home-based carers and other care workers provide services that allow other people to work and run households. Many are women, and some work informally or without strong employment protections.
So Nigeria’s care policy has two problems to address. How can it reduce the amount of unpaid care women are expected to carry? And how can it make paid care work accessible, fairly compensated and properly protected?
Professionalising caregiving could expand the supply of care services, but affordability matters too. If childcare or home-based care remains too expensive, families may continue relying heavily on unpaid care.
What should the policy actually change?
A National Care Policy cannot simply recognise that care exists. It needs to address who provides it, who pays for it and what support is available. That could mean affordable childcare and community-based care, support for older people and people with disabilities, social protection for families and better working conditions for paid care workers.
It also means looking at how care is shared between households, employers, communities and government. The infrastructure around care matters too. Healthcare, transport, water, electricity and social protection can all affect how much unpaid work households have to provide.
The goal is not necessarily to put a price on every meal cooked or every child taken to school. It is to recognise that when households provide care without adequate support, somebody is absorbing the cost in time, income or opportunity.
The next question is implementation
The Time Use Survey gives Nigeria a starting point because it makes unpaid work measurable. The emerging National Care Policy gives government an opportunity to respond to what that data shows.
But implementation will determine whether anything changes. If government invests in childcare, can it show that women are gaining more time for paid work or education? If caregiver training expands, how many people enter the sector, what do they earn and what protections do they receive? If social protection is introduced for people with significant care responsibilities, who receives it and does it improve their economic security?
And perhaps the simplest question: are women actually spending less time carrying unpaid care alone? Nigeria has started talking about care as part of the economy. The next step is making that recognition visible in women’s everyday lives, in the services available to families, the conditions of care workers and the amount of time women have left to work, earn, learn and lead.
