#5 MARCH 2017 Beyond cash transfers: Social Protection, Social Services and the Socialisation of Care Work in Mozambique Ruth Castel-Branco Last year my grandfather, a man in his late 80s, tumbled down the stairs of his apartment. A free spirit, he refuses to succumb to the limitations that age has placed on his mind and body, preferring to spend his days(and sometimes nights) traversing the city of Maputo. But on that day, his adventures ended in the orthopaedic ward of the Maputo Central Hospital. Though worried, I also felt relieved that he had been hospitalized; relieved because it lifted the burden of care off my shoulders. Yet it soon became apparent that the responsibility for his care—for feeding him, changing him, washing him, cleaning his mess—was in fact the family’s. I spent the next days fighting for his release, before we hired a domestic worker to nurse him to health. In Mozambique, social service provisioning relies heavily on women’s unpaid care work. So essential is our contribution, that the Labour Law of 2007 provides salaried women workers with 30 days of leave a year to take care of sick children. The limitation of this right to women however, sharpens the sexual division of labour, placing the burden of care squarely on women’s shoulders. This has constrained women’s opportunities in the labour market, as we struggle to juggle competing priorities, amidst employment discrimination and a generalised perception of our participation in wage-earning activities as complementary rather than essential to the household. While most Mozambicans—women and men alike—rely primarily on the informal economy to survive, employment statistics show that male heads of households are disproportionately employed in higher-wage occupations. Social protection has the potential to contribute to the reversal of patterns of subordination and discrimination in the labour market. In the last two decades, there has a been a global resurgence of interest in the developmental role of social protection 1