By Jean-Marie Nkurunziza, MenCare Regional Program Specialist, Sonke Gender Justice
“Fathers are ready and willing to care. Our job is to remove the barriers.”
That was one of my clearest reflections from the first MenCare Changemaker Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The gathering brought together 100 MenCare changemakers from around the world to consider a fundamental question: what will it take to build a world in which care is valued, supported, and shared by everyone?
In May 2026, I joined this global community alongside Heather van Niekerk, Sonke’s Co-Executive Director. Representing Sonke’s work across Africa, we spent four days learning, collaborating and exploring how to advance caring masculinities, and how to transform the ways boys and men understand care, fatherhood, relationships and equality.
Hosted by Equimundo in collaboration with WOW (Women of the World), the summit brought together diverse voices working across seven action tracks, including health, education, online spaces, democracy, care policy and belonging.
Although our settings differed, from Africa and Brazil to Portugal, Latin America and Europe—the challenges were strikingly similar. Rigid gender norms continue to define what boys and men are expected to be. Care remains undervalued and unequally distributed, while policies, workplaces, and social systems often make meaningful caregiving harder for men.
Yet the summit also offered a powerful reminder: change is possible, and a growing global movement is determined to make it happen.
Fatherhood Is Not a Side Issue
A highlight of the summit was the MenCare Masterclass on Fatherhood, which I co-facilitated on 29 May 2026 with regional leaders from across the continent.
Practitioners, researchers and advocates shared lessons from engaging fathers and caregivers in different contexts. The approaches included community-based group education, partnerships with health systems and faith leaders, and legal and policy advocacy for equal parental leave.
Drawing on evidence from Sonke’s State of South Africa’s Fathers report and our MenCare programme, which has reached more than 2,200 participants, we examined a critical question: how can we scale fatherhood programming without losing the local knowledge and cultural relevance that make it effective?
The answer is not simply to tell men to care more. Greater involvement requires us to address the systems and social norms that prevent fathers from taking an active role.
- Time to care and supportive workplaces.
- Policies that recognise fathers as caregivers.
- Health services that actively engage men.
- Communities that treat childcare as a shared human responsibility, not women’s work.
This is why fatherhood cannot be treated as a side issue.
When men are supported to become equal, involved, and non-violent caregivers, the benefits reach far beyond individual families. Relationships become stronger, children healthier and households more equitable. Communities are also better equipped to prevent violence and challenge harmful gender norms.
What Africa Brings to the Global Movement
The summit reinforced the importance of African experience in the global conversation on caring masculinities. Across the continent, organisations are promoting gender-equal parenting and unpaid care, advocating for parental leave, implementing parenting programmes, shaping policy and running media campaigns that encourage fathers and other parents to share caregiving.
Rio gave us an opportunity not only to learn from others, but also to show what the world can learn from Africa. While barriers vary by context, the underlying challenge is shared: we must transform the systems and norms that tell men care is not their responsibility.
Taking Care Beyond the Conference Room
The Boys and Men Festival, co-created by WOW and Equimundo, offered the summit’s most vivid demonstration of this idea. For one day, conversations about care, gender equality and manhood moved from conference rooms into public spaces through music, art, storytelling and dialogue.
The festival showed that this work cannot live only in policy documents; it must also live in culture. In that space, the MenCare Global Fatherhood Campaign’s vision—transforming intergenerational patterns of harm and promoting patterns of care among fathers, boys, men and people of all genders—came alive.
The festival showed what can happen when we create opportunities for people to imagine a different kind of masculinity: one where strength and care are not opposites, where fatherhood is about presence as much as provision, and where caring is understood as a shared responsibility rather than a gendered expectation.
From Rio to Africa
As I return to Sonke and to our regional partners, I do so with new tools, new allies and renewed commitment. The global connections made in Rio will directly inform our work to strengthen MenCare in Africa, expand fatherhood programming, and advocate for care policies that work for parents, men, women and children.
But the real work begins beyond Rio.
It is about taking these conversations into communities, health facilities, workplaces, schools, faith spaces and homes. It is about making it easier for fathers to care, easier for families to share care, and easier for societies to recognise care as essential to building a more equal future.
The message I take from Rio is simple: fathers are ready to care. The question is whether we are ready to remove the barriers that stand in their way. The #MenCareChangemakers are building a global movement, and Africa has a critical role to play, not only in joining that movement, but in helping to lead it.
Care leads to care. And the future we build depends on making space for it.
