American University

This grant will support the Accountability Research Center at American University. The Center conducts action research in partnership with civil society organizations that are testing various approaches to expand citizens’ access to and use of information to identify gaps in service provision and to demand improvements. Their research focuses on power dynamics, and whether and how service providers and government decision makers are responsive to these demands. The Center’s activities aim to build the capacity and create channels for innovative civil society organizations from low- and middle-income countries to interrogate and share what they are learning within the transparency, participation, and accountability field and with other global development practitioners.

This supplement grant will support American University to undertake qualitative and quantitative fieldwork in South Korea as part of the Care Work and the Economy project. Overall, the project seeks to incorporate the care economy and gender-disaggregated activities explicitly into macroeconomic models. This additional funding will allow an interdisciplinary research team to more accurately measure the aggregate care economy and examine the nature of care provision using a mixed methods approach.

This grant will support American University to lead a working group composed of scholars from multiple disciplines to help produce new research that incorporates the care economy and gender-disaggregated activities into macroeconomic models. The project will include three work streams: (a) production of macroeconomic models that incorporate paid and unpaid care of children, the sick, and the elderly; (b) measurement of the aggregate care economy; and (c) production of empirical research that integrates an understanding of care as an element of the economy.