We Should Copy this Time-saving Bogotá Policy (with Diana Rodriguez Franco)

I’m Suzanne Kahn, SVP at Roosevelt Forward. And today, as my daughter heads back to school and the care chaos of summer finally slows, I’m excited to bring you a piece about making care easier.

I recently coauthored a report over at our sister organization, the Roosevelt Institute, called The Good Life Agenda. In it, we argued that one of the key building blocks of a good life is time—time to spend with your family or your community, to pursue your passions, or to just rest.

As the report pointed out, Americans have had way less time than they need, let alone want. The average middle-class American couple with children works 600 more paid hours a year than they did in 1975—essentially four extra months of work annually—without any meaningful increase in support for the care work that still has to get done.

And so for millions of families, and especially for women, the hours just keep disappearing.

This is a policy choice. We’ve long known that policies like paid leave, childcare, and long-term care can help give us more time in our days.

The Good Life Agenda also spotlights a creative policy fewer people might know, but that has given people in Bogotá, Colombia, meaningfully more time in their days: Care Blocks, or manzanas del cuidado.

Launched in 2020, Care Blocks brought together services like laundry facilities, childcare, job training, legal aid, health services, all within a few blocks of each other. The idea was simple and radical at the same time: What if the city made it easier for caregivers to access the services they need in ways that saved them time?

It worked. And now cities from Baltimore to Freetown, Sierra Leone, are paying attention.

I was so excited to talk with the architect of that program, Diana Rodriguez Franco, who currently serves as special advisor to the president of the Inter-American Development Bank Group. From 2020 to 2023, Diana served as Bogotá’s secretary for women’s affairs, the role in which she conceived and launched Care Blocks.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Diana Rodriguez Franco: Well, let’s start at the beginning: When the former mayor of Bogotá, Claudia Lopez, was running to become the city’s first elected woman mayor, she met with a group of women from civil society, sometimes referred to as Las Mujeres de Bogotá. They told her, “For decades, we’ve asked every single candidate to build a care system—not just care services here and there, but a truly integrated care system.” Claudia agreed to that, and a few weeks later she was elected mayor and invited me to be part of her administration.

We took office on January 1, 2020. I was not an expert on care, so I hired two incredible women from different backgrounds who knew the field extremely well; I learned alongside them. As I listened to them, to other women across the city, and caught up on the literature—to make a really long story short—I realized that what women were telling us was that they needed easier access to all the services that already exist, and time to access them.

Bogotá is a very interesting and publicly oriented city with many great services for women, but they were really spread across the city. So imagine a woman who needed to take her grandson to an early childhood development center while also caring for her father, who couldn’t leave the house. She was constantly juggling competing caregiving responsibilities, making it nearly impossible to take advantage of the services available to her.

In many ways, women were trapped in time poverty. So I kept asking myself, “What can we do differently this time? How can we really create real change?”

One day, I was alone in my office, and I literally took a whiteboard, drew a circle, like a pizza, and said, “This is what we’re going to do.” We can use existing infrastructure and organize services around people’s daily lives, instead of having one service here and another all the way across town.

At the time, I was very aware of how much time many women in Bogotá spent washing by hand. So I thought, “What if we put laundry facilities, childcare services, and a park within walking distance of one another?”

I called my team in and I asked, “What do you think?” They said, “Where did this idea come from? Has it ever been done before?” I said, “Nowhere, as far as I know.”

I’m telling you this because if those experts had said, it’s never been tested, there’s no randomized controlled trial, we can’t do that, I probably would have erased the Care Block altogether from my whiteboard and from my mind, and moved on.

But they didn’t. They said, “That’s interesting.”

A few days later, the mayor calls me and tells me we have this important meeting with this organization that worked on care. What are we going to propose? I said, “I have an idea.” She said, “Okay, come to my house tomorrow at 6:00 am and tell me about it before that meeting.”

I get there, and we were already running late. So we get in the car, and I pitch exactly the same idea I shared with my team. She is immediately on fire, and starts throwing out all these ideas and suggestions. By the time we get to the meeting, we present this as if we had done this for a PhD dissertation for the past seven years. And it lands really well, they start asking questions.

And then the mayor said, “Okay, Diana, now go do it.”

Diana: We started by defining the objectives. We said our goals were to recognize care, reorganize care, and reduce the burden of care. That’s what a city can do. And then we asked ourselves: What services are already out there doing some of this, but perhaps are not framed in a way that recognizes caregivers or addresses their needs? What can we bring together? What else is needed? And which other government ministries need to be on board?

In Spanish, the program is called manzana del cuidado. A manzana is a city block; it’s the small, familiar area where daily life happens. It’s where you learn to ride a bike, where you have friends, and where you know your neighbors. We wanted to organize services at that scale, using the existing infrastructure.

Nine months later, we inaugurated our first Care Block.

Diana: Yes. The 3R framework comes from the International Labor Organization. [Their 5Rs are Recognize, Reduce, Redistribute, Reward, and Represent.]

Why did we start with recognition? Because the word cuidadora, or caregiver in English, wasn’t a word many women in Bogotá would identify themselves with. So, first we wanted caregivers to recognize themselves and the important work they do.

If there’s one major change in the past six years, it is that the term caregiver is now being used more widely. We’ve seen a shift toward people adopting “caregiver” as an identity, and it’s not just women.

Second, we wanted everyone to recognize that caregivers were actually the ones sustaining society, sustaining life, sustaining our cities. We wanted to make visible that invisible work as an economic activity that benefits us all and that we all share.

We also wanted to reorganize how care is provided. It’s not that those requiring care are bad, far from it. But we need to address the fact that this work disproportionately falls on women, especially low-income women, women of color, Indigenous women, and migrant women. It also traps many women in time poverty.

In Bogotá, many of the caregivers we worked with had dropped out of high school or even elementary school to provide care. They missed their own health checkups because of their caregiving responsibilities. So we wanted to redistribute how care is provided to give time back to those women. We wanted to shift caregiving responsibilities among the healthy adults in the household, among communities, and between the public and private sectors.

Finally, we wanted to reduce the burden on women. How could we give women more time? For example, providing washers and dryers in the Care Blocks saved many women at least an hour and a half each day. For women who washed their clothes by hand, it could save an entire Saturday!

Likewise, when we offered services where children could be dropped off for play and learning activities, it reduced women’s caregiving time and gave them the opportunity to attend the classes we offered in the Care Blocks.

We thought it was important not only to recognize everything women sacrificed because of their caregiving responsibilities, but also to give them the opportunity to do those things that they had put on hold.

Diana: In some ways the pandemic helped. It made care visible to many policymakers, who were at home experiencing its demands more directly for the first time. But it also created challenges, because we did not know whether we would have resources to make it happen.

In the end, there was also a public spending efficiency argument. When you take office, too often you say, “Okay, this is what I inherited, this is what I’ll continue doing with a few tweaks.” There’s rarely time to take a step back and fully assess what’s already in place.

The first thing we did was try to understand what was already being offered that could help us achieve our objectives. City governments often work in silos. What the education ministry does doesn’t necessarily connect with what the health ministry or the women’s ministry is doing.

There were a lot of duplicities, and pulling the services together geographically was an opportunity to find those. It turned out that, once we brought existing services together within the Care Blocks, we could clearly see what programs were already available for caregivers and women in general, and tailor them more effectively to the needs of specific populations: children, older persons, people with disabilities, even for men and their families.

Diana: It was a mix. For example, the free public washers and dryers were new. We also introduced a new course that helped women identify themselves as caregivers and tools for caregivers called Autoreconocimiento de las cuidadoras (self-recognition of caregivers).

We developed that course so people would understand why care and self-care was important. It was great. Even the way women spoke and entered the room changed. Other services had been offered at a small scale—like courses on learning how to ride a bike—but we made them more widely available and framed differently as respite services for caregivers.

We did try to nudge how people used the services. For example, the washers and the dryers were available if people enrolled in another activity, or even if they simply said they were going to have coffee with a friend. We didn’t want people to just drop off their laundry and go back home to continue with their caregiving responsibilities.

We did a lot of hand-holding and explaining that the whole point was for them to drop their clothes here, and then drop off your nephew, grandchildren, child, or older family member at one of these activities, and finally have time for themselves. It required a lot of one-on-one reach-out. It was not something you could explain on Twitter; it required a lot of human interaction because people were becoming aware of a new identity and new services.

Diana: At the end of our four-year term, we conducted an impact evaluation to assess results across the three Rs. The study confirmed the need for these services. Caregivers were prioritizing going to the Care Blocks, because they provided services that increased their well-being and improved their health.

The blocks gave them recognition—respite, awareness, and dignity. The firm that carried out the evaluation also found that it was still too soon to see meaningful changes in the redistribution of care within households. We were not really seeing that yet. Changes in social norms take time.

Diana: Yes, but I can tell you anecdotally about other impacts. There were women who would spontaneously say “I’m happier.” A few women even told me they no longer wanted to take their own lives.

I remember two cases very clearly. One happened in front of a huge public audience. Before the city government’s development plan is approved in July, they have this huge hearing with all the council members where any citizen can speak. This woman took the mic and said, “I was going to commit suicide, but I changed my mind after going to a Care Block because now I have time and support.”

The same thing happened with another woman, who I remember very clearly, because Bloomberg Philanthropies was visiting Bogotá and toured one of the Care Blocks. They asked to speak with a few caregivers, so we invited some at random. One woman began by saying,

I’m the single mother of two children with disabilities. Nobody has ever helped me care for my children. I rarely leave my home. My daughter was sexually abused recently, and after that I thought about taking my own life because I could no longer handle the pressure. Then a neighbor told me there was this thing called a Care Block. I went, and they offered free legal advice and psychological aid, but I’ve also been doing exercise twice a week here, like yoga classes, dance classes because for the first time, somebody is helping me care for my children. They’re in a safe space, participating in activities for them and while I’m able to do this.

She was wearing a white blouse with black spots, and she said, “Look, I always wanted to become an entrepreneur in the fashion district. And I learned about a program that offered small grants for that. I applied and received one. So now I have time, I can make an income.”

Diana: Bogotá has received the largest number of Venezuelan migrants, and the city has been very welcoming, providing access to basic services, including healthcare, education, and, of course, the Care Blocks. Migrant women often reported building new ties both with the receiving community and the migrant community, because they would mingle at the Care Blocks.

Diana: Yes. Women using the Care Blocks started forming communities and asking for specific services. For example, one day the Venezuelan women told us, “We don’t want individual psychological aid, we want group aid. It’s a way to build community.” And they did.

A few months later, I went back, and one woman held up her cell phone and said, “Look, I now have a WhatsApp group with friends. When I arrived I did not know anyone. And one of them was who told me how to enroll my son in school.”

Participating in the Care Blocks not only gave women a sense of belonging, but also helped their family members. At the beginning, many men would stand outside the Care Blocks and ask “what is this thing called the manzana?” Gradually, men started to participate, not only in care school for men, a program where we taught them how to feed a baby with a bottle, change a diaper, and other caregiving skills, but also by enrolling in the flexible high school program and computer courses.

Diana: Yes, Baltimore is thinking about it. Outside the US, a Care Block was inaugurated in Sierra Leone in May.

Here is the thing: The affordability and care crises are not limited to low- and middle-income countries, and there are practical solutions. The infrastructure may look a little different, but what is indispensable are the underlying principles. Those are what makes a Care Block a Care Block.

Second, the way societies organize care reflects what they value and whom they value. The Care Blocks can help reorganize societies around care, recognizing and valuing both caregivers and those who receive care.

I think it’s essential to understand that Care Blocks are not only about servicing women. For the model to work, we need to support all caregivers, including men, by giving them access to the services they have put on hold, while at the same time and nearby caring for those they care for. Without that, it will be hard to achieve a more equitable redistribution of care or reduce its burden.

Simultaneity and proximity are the core principles, and can be replicated in the United States.