When Makieze Medina’s mother was widowed, she didn’t think twice about bringing her from Guanajuato to live with her family in Mexico City. But her advanced Alzheimer’s required constant care that Medina couldn’t provide while working for a civil society organization.
“I had to find a care centre so I could keep working,” says Medina.
She tried looking for elder-care day centres online, but was frustrated to find so few, with many limitations. So, she decided to try using the National Care Map of Mexico (MACU).
“The MACU helped me a lot,” says Medina. “I could see even private centres, and how many kilometres away they were … I found a private elder-care facility near my house and my work.”
Her mother has been there for three years now. “She has her routine; all the staff know her; they sing; they paint … the socialization helps her a lot. If she were at home, the doctors tell me she would have deteriorated more. It’s been the best thing for both of us. It’s allowed me not only to work, but also to have peace of mind at work.”
Her story isn’t isolated. Across Mexico, millions of working women struggle with finding care for their children, elderly parents or loved ones with disabilities, to ease their unpaid care burdens.
Allowing the general public to find care centres is just one of MACU’s many benefits. Launched in 2023, it covers 91,836 care establishments – 75% public, 19% private and 6% run by civil society – providing georeferenced information, statistics and 31 indicators on the supply and demand for care, and the location and accessibility of existing care services for children, people with disabilities and older adults.
This information is also being used by policymakers and service-providers to improve access and services.
“It’s an indispensable source for public policy and has an impact in various ways because it allows planning around care,” says Marta Ferreyra, former Director General of the National Policy for Equality and Women’s Rights at Mexico’s former National Institute for Women (INMUJERES). “It allows you to see – really see – the inequality in access to services and the structural bottlenecks.”
She helped champion MACU alongside Colegio de México (COLMEX) and UN Women, through its Global Centre of Excellence on Gender Statistics (CEGS).
“It created a narrative of reliable data to support policy,” adds Ferreyra. “From my position as Head of Mexico’s Equality Policy and first National Care Policy, MACU marked a turning point, justifying the need for a comprehensive policy and national care system.”
MACU was developed alongside the Government’s Pro-Equality Programme (PROIGUALDAD), which Ferreyra says MACU data not only informed, but a data-creation and dissemination programme was even built into PROIGUALDAD’s design. MACU also led to the development of complementary public policy tools, including the Care Observatory, providing qualitative analysis, which was later added to the MACU platform, the Guide for the Establishment of the National Care System, and care model pilots.
“You need to know the supply of care to be able to build a care model,” explains Ferreyra. “We used MACU between 2023 and 2024 to build care and poverty models and policies in Oaxaca, Quintana Roo, Jalisco, Nuevo León, Ciudad Juárez, and Mexico City … and when we created three care model pilots in La Paz, Zapopán and San Quintín.”
She says MACU data equally shaped women’s empowerment programmes, like the Comprehensive Care Programme for the Well-being of Women (PAIBIM) and the Women’s Development Centres.
MACU data also informed Mexico’s new National Development Plan (2025–2030), particularly Objective T1.2: to promote a care society with a gender, intersectional, intercultural and intergenerational perspective. The Plan’s monitoring framework also uses MACU estimates as a baseline.
Research, advocacy and training
Non-profit organizations, civil society and academia have also been putting MACU to good use.
Says Elisa Gómez, of the Friedrich Ebert Foundation, which is part of the Coalition for the Right to Dignified Care and Women’s Time: “MACU is a tool for advocacy that we also disseminate and use in training and academic analysis.”
“When I look at the map and see what services are available around me, the pieces of the puzzle begin falling into place regarding what citizens should demand,” she explains. “Developing care assessments is essential, and for this, MACU is a fundamental tool … to make what is needed more visible and viable, and help to chart a more realistic course of action regarding what is needed, how much it costs, and how to get there.”
Gómez says the Coalition is currently using MACU to assist the Municipality of Mérida with a diagnostic assessment to map its care services. It also regularly uses MACU in trainings, such as under its “Care Practices and Knowledge” Programme.
She says another great value-add of MACU is that it maps not just public, but also private services and that “it considers us, as civil society, as end-users. Sometimes these tools are only designed for governments, but civil society is an important user.”
As of late 2025, MACU had responded to more than 27,000 queries for information, making it a widely consulted online resource.
