climate resilient systems | caring futures | equal cities
Care Wallet
Quantifying care to strengthen resilience
Resource Type
Model
Current Status
Developed. Pilot in Progress.
Every household has care needs, the time, labour, goods, and services, access to infrastructure, required to look after children, older persons, people with disabilities, and caregivers themselves. These needs have a monetary value, we call it the Care Wallet (CW)
01
What it is?
A Measure for Quantifying and Valuing Care Needs at an Individual & Household Level.
It is household-level care needs measurement model that estimates the real cost of meeting care needs over a defined time period. It captures both monetary and non-monetary dimensions of care, accounting for how care needs vary by household composition, location, service availability, and climate exposure.
A framework that helps assign a monetary value to complete care needs of individuals and households. Estimates the true cost of meeting care needs across time, money, and access.
02
Why it is being developed?
Traditional systems account only for direct expenditures on goods and services. Care is a foundational input into household well-being, labour participation, and economic stability, yet it is largely invisible in financing, budget and investment decisions, risk management, planning and policy design.
Without a way to quantify the real care needs and costs, decision-makers underestimate risk, misallocate resources, and design financing, investment and policies that continue to undermine care while increasing the unpaid care burden and preventing caregivers (primarily women)from equitably participating in the economy and eroding household level resilience.
The Care Wallet exists to close this gap by providing a clear, structured estimate of care cost and burden that can then help build resilience both at the household and the city level.
03
What it enables in the C² architecture?
Care Wallet reframes care as a measurable economic & social function — necessary for human well-being, productivity, and resilience — by estimating the adequate value of care required for individuals and households
Unified singular unit for care valuation - By bringing in all aspects of care - time, labour, goods, services and access penalities within its ambit
Visualisation of actual care needs and costs - Makes the full cost of care at household level, both paid and unpaid, visible.
Comparable care analysis across locations - Allows care costs and burdens to be compared across cities, neighbourhoods, and climate contexts.
Early identification of care stress - Reveals when households are likely compensating through unpaid care, debt, or foregone income
Leading Indicator for resilience gaps and triggers - Offers the possibility of serving as a resilience proxy or a care sufficiency signal, for financing, investment targeting and infrastructure development decisions
Foundation for care-responsive decisions - Provides the base input for downstream tools and initiatives, including CSI, CCAS, and blended finance design.
04
Current & Potential Use Cases
The Care Wallet reframes care as a measurable economic & social function — necessary for human well-being, productivity, and resilience, by estimating the adequate value of care required for individuals and households.
Understand care pressure on households - See whether households can meet care needs without financial or time stress
Identify where support is needed most - Spot care gaps by location and household type to target interventions
Design better financial or insurance products - Use care insights to shape coverage, pricing, and risk support
Improve public programmes and budgets - Align social protection, labour policy, and care spending with real needs
Use Cases
Governments & Public Authorities - Use the Care Wallet to understand the true household cost of care in different locations, informing social protection design, care provisioning, and gender-responsive budgeting.
City Governments - Use it to identify neighbourhoods where care costs and access constraints are likely to undermine resilience during climate stress.
Financial Institutions & Insurers - Use Care Wallet outputs as an intelligence input to understand care-driven affordability and vulnerability that affect repayment capacity and insurance risk.
Development Partners & Impact Funds - Use it to ground programme design and targeting in actual care costs, rather than assumptions about household coping capacity.
Researchers & policymakers - Use the model to analyse how care costs interact with climate exposure, labour participation, and inequality to design equitable policies that drive better resilience outcomes
06
Related Resources
explore resources we are developing, the practical building blocks behind the care-climate (C²) risk management and decision support architecture. These resources are developed through applied pilots and ongoing initiatives. Together, they translate care and climate (C²) dynamics into operational insight for finance, policy, and urban planning, resource allocation and governance systems.
Climate & Care (C²) Responsive Blended Finance Facility
Initiative
Design
A South Asia pilot initiative across India, Sri Lanka, and Nepal to design and test a care & climate (C²) responsive blended finance model, informed by household resilience insights and generating evidence for replication across emerging Asian economies.
