Care Blocks System: Colombia

Bogotá’s Care Blocks is a place-based public policy within the District Care System, first implemented in 2020, that brings together free services for unpaid caregivers—especially women—and their families in accessible neighborhood hubs. The policy aims to reduce the unequal burden of unpaid care by freeing time, improving access to education, well-being, and income opportunities, and supporting children, older persons, and persons with disabilities through coordinated local services.

Launched in 2020, Bogotá’s Care Blocks is a public policy within the city’s broader District Care System that brings together free public services for unpaid caregivers—especially women—and their families in one accessible area.¹ The policy is designed so caregivers can access multiple services close to home and, in many cases, at the same time that children, older persons, or persons with disabilities are receiving care or participating in activities nearby.² In practice, this means a caregiver might leave a child in a sports or cultural activity and then attend secondary school completion classes, entrepreneurship training, physical exercise sessions, psychosocial support, legal advice, or community laundry services in the same service area. The policy is part of a citywide care model led by Bogotá’s Secretariat for Women and guided by the principles of recognizing, redistributing, and reducing unpaid care work, which is performed mostly by women.³

Within the District Care System, Care Blocks is the flagship territorial strategy and the system’s most visible component. Rather than creating a single standalone center, the policy connects existing schools, parks, community facilities, care centers, and other public infrastructure within a walkable urban area, under principles of proximity and multifunctionality.⁴ This model has become especially important in Bogotá because it makes the care system legible to the public: it translates a broad institutional strategy into a concrete neighborhood-based service network that people can use in their daily lives.⁵

The policy includes five main service components:

• Education and skills-building: Basic and secondary education, flexible learning, certification of prior knowledge.
• Respite and well-being services: Sports, recreation, psychosocial care, legal support, community laundries.
• Income-generation support: Entrepreneurship, formalization, employment pathways.
• Care and support services for dependents through pedagogical, cultural, and recreational activities.
• Cultural transformation services aimed especially at men, families, and communities to encourage a fairer distribution of care responsibilities.

Implementation

Bogotá’s Care Blocks emerged from more than a decade of advocacy by women and feminist movements—gaining a decisive political opening when then-mayor Claudia López committed during her candidacy to creating a district care system that would recognize, reduce, and redistribute unpaid care work.⁶ After taking office, her administration made care policy a priority and incorporated a districtwide care system into the city’s development agenda, creating the basis for the rollout of Care Blocks and other care modalities across Bogotá.⁷ The policy remains ongoing under Mayor Carlos Fernando Galán’s administration, which has publicly reaffirmed support for the District Care System and continued expanding the Care Blocks network.⁸

Implementation is led by Bogotá’s Secretariat for Women, which is responsible for the governance of the District Care System and coordinates delivery across multiple public entities.⁹ The system operates through an Intersectoral District Care System Committee, a Technical Support Unit responsible for operational management in the territory, and a Participation and Follow-up Mechanism that incorporates target populations and the broader public into implementation and oversight.¹⁰ Bogotá also uses Inter-administrative Agreement 913 of 2021 as the main formal coordination instrument through which district entities work together to deliver the system’s services in an articulated way.¹¹

Implementation combines inter-agency coordination with territorial planning. The city mapped existing services, used georeferenced information to identify priority areas, and organized delivery through Care Blocks, Care Buses, and home-based care so services can be offered simultaneously, flexibly, and close to where caregivers live.¹² International cooperation partners, universities, national agencies, private firms, and community organizations also support implementation with technical, financial, and operational inputs.¹³

Investment

There is no publicly available aggregate figure that identifies the exact total investment in the Care Blocks policy alone. The available management reporting from Bogotá’s Secretariat for Women presents public budget information for the broader District Care System, but does not consolidate those figures with external financing. According to that reporting, the District Care System had a budget of roughly COP 10 billion in 2023¹⁴ (approximately USD 2.3 million) and COP 5.2 billion in 2024¹⁵ (approximately USD 1.3 million). In addition, the French Development Agency (AFD) provided Bogotá with a EUR 150 million budget-support loan. Although that loan was not earmarked exclusively for Care Blocks, official sources indicate that part of those resources supported investments that included the program.¹⁶

Assessment

Available evidence suggests that the policy has generated meaningful benefits for unpaid caregivers—especially women—while still facing uneven territorial reach and limited effects on how care is redistributed inside households.¹⁷ By June 2025, the broader District Care System had delivered more than 6.7 million service interactions to 911,928 women and their families, indicating sustained demand and continued institutional support over time.¹⁸ Within that broader system, the Care Blocks network had expanded to 25 sites by early 2025.¹⁹ One of the policy’s most widely cited achievements has been to make unpaid care work visible as a public issue rather than a private burden, advancing the policy’s goal of recognition.²⁰

The strongest measurable evidence comes from the 2024 evaluation of Bogotá’s District Care System.²¹ It found that Care Blocks reached about 36 percent of an estimated target population of roughly 190,000 people, although coverage varied significantly across localities. Satisfaction was also high: among 18,390 responses, about three in four users said they would actively recommend the service to others, while only 9 percent reported a negative assessment, suggesting that most participants viewed the policy positively despite access barriers in some areas.²²

In terms of impact, the evaluation found improvements in self-care and well-being. Participants spent about 17 more minutes on sports or exercise, and the share of caregivers who reported feeling happy or very happy increased by 7 percentage points.²³ Qualitative evidence also indicates reduced stress, less isolation, and stronger social support among participants. At the same time, the evaluation did not find significant improvements in the redistribution of domestic responsibilities within households.²⁴

On sustainability, the policy appears relatively strong: it has been anchored in Bogotá’s gender policy, land-use planning framework, and district institutional structure, which several observers identify as key to its continuity beyond a single administration.²⁵

Looking ahead, the main challenges are to expand coverage more evenly across localities, reduce access barriers related to travel time and service availability, and strengthen the policy’s ability to change how care and domestic work are shared within households, where impacts remain more limited.²⁶ The evaluation also points to operational challenges, including staff overload and uneven understanding of the system’s goals across institutions, suggesting that long-term sustainability will depend not only on political support but also on stronger coordination and implementation capacity.²⁷

Additional Information

Bogotá’s Care Blocks policy has gained international recognition as an innovation in gender policy: in 2024 alone, it received 26 visits from foreign delegations interested in learning from or replicating the system, and countries such as Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, and Sierra Leone are reported to be developing similar approaches. Within Colombia, cities including Medellín, Manizales, and Cali have also begun adapting elements of the model to their own contexts.²⁸

Small Children Crossing the Street in Bogota, Colombia ©Flickr/ex_magician

Tags

• Care Economy
• Children & Youth
• Gender
• Middle-Income Country
• Social Protection