Introducing Homefront: The Conversations We Need to Have About Care, Family, and the Modern Home
For the last few years through The Care Gap, I’ve written about the invisible work that holds our economies together.
Care.
The unpaid labor of raising children, managing homes, supporting families, and caring for elders. Work that overwhelmingly falls on women, and yet remains largely invisible in economic data, policy conversations, and workplace design.
But long before I began writing about care, I was living it.
Over the last two decades, I have worked across four Fortune 100 companies in the United States. During that time, I also became a mother of four children. Like many parents navigating modern life, I found myself constantly piecing together childcare solutions, sometimes through formal systems, sometimes through family networks, and sometimes through sheer improvisation.
Across cities, jobs, and continents, I was always asking the same question:
How do families actually make care work?
Because whether you are in Lagos, London, or Los Angeles, one truth remains the same:
Care makes everything else possible.
And yet, how we organize care, inside our homes and across our societies, remains one of the most overlooked questions of our time.
This realization is what led me to create Homefront.
Why Homefront?
The home is where everything begins.
It is where children are raised, where partnerships are tested, where gender roles are negotiated, and where the daily work of sustaining life quietly unfolds.
And yet, across cultures, the way we organize that work has often remained deeply unequal, even as society itself has evolved.
More women are educated than ever before.
More women are working.
More families depend on dual incomes.
But in many places, the structure of the home has not caught up with these realities.
Women continue to carry the majority of domestic labor, childcare responsibilities, and emotional management of family life—often while maintaining full careers.
This imbalance affects everything.
It shapes career trajectories.
It influences relationship dynamics.
It impacts health and wellbeing.
It determines whether families thrive or simply survive.
And yet, these conversations often remain private—confined to kitchen tables, group chats, and quiet frustrations.
Homefront brings those conversations into the open.
What Homefront Is About
Homefront is a podcast about the real work of running a home.
Each season will explore how families organize care within a specific cultural context, examining the social expectations, economic realities, and gender norms that shape everyday life.
Season 1 begins in Nigeria.
Through candid conversations with mothers, fathers, caregivers, creators, and experts, we explore the realities of modern Nigerian households:
Who actually runs the home?
How do couples navigate shifting expectations?
What happens when care systems fail families?
Why is childcare still one of the biggest barriers to women’s economic participation?
Future seasons of Homefront will travel beyond Nigeria to explore how families across the world are confronting similar questions in very different ways.
Because the truth is simple:
The care crisis is global.
But the solutions must be shaped by culture, community, and context.
Episode 1: Who Is Watching the Children? The Childcare Crisis in Nigeria
The first episode of Homefront tackles one of the most urgent issues facing families today: childcare.
In this episode, I sit down with two leaders working at the forefront of Nigeria’s care sector:
Itoro Ugorji, Founder & CEO of The Baby Lounge
Amara Agbim, Founder & CEO of The Nanny Academy
Together, we unpack the growing childcare crisis affecting millions of Nigerian families.
We discuss:
Why childcare has become increasingly difficult to access
The realities of Nigeria’s largely informal care workforce
The challenges childcare providers face in maintaining quality and safety
Why care work remains undervalued despite its essential role in society
What policy changes and partnerships could help strengthen the sector
At its core, this episode asks a simple but urgent question:
Who is watching the children, and at what cost?
Because without reliable childcare, women struggle to participate fully in the workforce, businesses lose talent, and economies lose billions in productivity.
Childcare is not a personal issue.
It is infrastructure.
Why These Conversations Matter
The goal of Homefront is not to assign blame. It is to create understanding. If we want stronger families, thriving workplaces, and more equitable societies, we must begin by examining how care is organized, and who carries its burden. These conversations are long overdue. And they start at the homefront.
Welcome to the Homefront
🎧 Episode 1: Who Is Watching the Children? The Childcare Crisis in Nigeria is now live on Youtube, Spotify.
If you’ve ever wondered why modern family life feels harder than it should…
If you’ve ever tried to balance work, children, and everything in between…
If you care about building societies where families can truly thrive….
This conversation is for you.
Blessing Adesiyan is a chemical engineer, climate and care economist, Editor-In-Chief of The Care Gap and the Founder and Chief Care Officer of Caring Africa, advancing care as essential economic infrastructure through systems change, policy, and investment.