The world’s billionaires (2,153) controlled more wealth than the poorest 4.6 billion people – some 60 percent of the planet’s population – combined in 2019, Oxfam said on Monday, in a report released ahead of the annual World Economic Forum (WEF) of political and business leaders in Davos, Switzerland.
Oxfam’s report, Time to Care, details how global inequality is entrenched and vast. It also shows how sexist economies fuel the inequality crisis, allowing a wealthy elite to accumulate huge fortunes at the expense of ordinary people, particularly poor women and girls.
According to the report, women and girls put in 12.5 billion hours of unpaid care work each and every day – a contribution to the global economy of at least $10.8 trillion a year, more than three times the size of the global tech industry.
Across the globe, 42 percent of women of working age cannot get jobs because they are responsible for all the caregiving, compared to just six percent of men. Meanwhile, the 22 richest men in the world have more wealth than all the women in Africa.
“It is important for us to underscore that the hidden engine of the economy that we see is really the unpaid care work of women. And that needs to change,” Amitabh Behar, CEO of Oxfam India who is in Davos to represent the Oxfam confederation this year, told Reuters in an interview.
Women also make up two-thirds of the paid ‘care workforce’ which covers jobs such as nursery workers, domestic workers, and care assistants all of who are often poorly paid, get scant benefits, work irregular hours, and suffer from a physical and emotional toll.
The report projects that pressure on care providers, both unpaid and paid, is set to grow in the coming decade as the global population grows and ages. An estimated 2.3 billion people will be in need of care by 2030 – an increase of 200 million since 2015. Climate change could worsen the looming global care crisis – by 2025, up to 2.4 billion people are projected to live in areas without enough water, and women and girls will have to walk even longer distances to fetch it.
To highlight the magnitude of the global inequality crisis, the Oxfam report says getting the richest one percent to pay just 0.5 percent extra tax on their wealth over the next 10 years would equal the investment needed to create 117 million jobs in sectors such as elderly and childcare, education and health.
But governments are massively under-taxing the wealthiest individuals and corporations and failing to collect revenues that could help lift the responsibility of care from women and tackle poverty and inequality, it said. They are also underfunding vital public services and infrastructure that could help reduce women’s and girls’ workload.
“Governments created the inequality crisis – they must act now to end it,” said Behar. “They must ensure corporations and wealthy individuals pay their fair share of tax and increase investment in public services and infrastructure … Governments must prioritize care as being as important as all other sectors in order to build more human economies that work for everyone, not just a fortunate few.”
The Nairobi-headquartered Oxfam is part of the Fight Inequality Alliance, a growing global coalition of civil society organizations and activists. The group has scheduled events from 18-25 January in 30 countries – including India, Kenya, Mexico, Pakistan, South Africa, Uganda, and the United Kingdom – to promote solutions to inequality and demand that economies work for everyone.
