Santiago Commitment

The Santiago Commitment connects care and women’s autonomy to collective provision, public institutions and economic policy, making resources central to feminist accountability.

The Santiago Commitment places women’s autonomy within economic change and resource allocation. Adopted through the fourteenth Regional Conference on Women in Latin America and the Caribbean in January 2020, it precedes the pandemic and differs from the similarly titled 2021 report on pandemic responses.

Paragraphs 24–26 connect countercyclical policy, care’s economic multiplier effects and comprehensive care systems. Care is not a private supplement after growth; it belongs within employment, redistribution, time, funding and public services. Shared responsibility among states, markets, households, communities, women and men exceeds helping individual women balance competing demands.

Paragraph 5 concerns institutions, budgets and accountability; paragraphs 37–38 address gender statistics and time series. Testable policy needs visibility into spending and total work, including women obscured by averages. Statistics support this process without replacing participation in defining the problem.

The text recognizes intersecting discrimination and supports women’s and feminist organizations in climate and policy processes. Yet a regional political commitment is not a new individually enforceable law automatically applicable in every country. Paragraph 40’s voluntary reporting also marks a monitoring limit. Calling care an economic investment must not make carers’ or recipients’ value conditional on growth.

The 2022 Buenos Aires Commitment follows the development of a care-society agenda. The Montevideo Strategy supplies an earlier discussion of implementation. Reading them chronologically distinguishes accumulated commitments from delivery, rather than counting declarations as equality achieved.