Home helper: the scope always drifts towards the person

"Could you also…?" It is the most ordinary sentence in the trade, and the most decisive. Sometimes it is about a window; sometimes about changing a dressing. Between the two there is no difference in tone: there is a professional boundary, and it is for the home helper to know where it runs.

Two possible clients, one beneficiary

In this trade, whoever places the order is not always whoever receives the service.

A busy household may order for itself. But a family often orders for an elderly parent, a convalescent relative or someone whose independence has declined — sometimes from another city. The person who pays, the person who receives and the person who decides may then be three different people.

That imposes three precautions. Knowing who decides the scope. Knowing to whom you report. And above all never forgetting that the person whose home you work in remains the person concerned: you speak to them, you ask their view, you do not organise their day over their head because a third party settles the bill.

"Help around the house" means nothing until it is written down

This is the trade's founding misunderstanding: two people use the same phrase for two very different things.

Hence the only remedy that works: an agreed list, written, task by task. What is done at every visit, what is done periodically, what is not included, and how something is added — by explicit agreement, not by a request slipped in one morning.

That list protects the helper as much as the client. Without it, the service expands by small increments until the agreed hours no longer suffice, and then it is quality that drops — or the person who burns out.

What makes the price vary is also named: the nature of the tasks, the duration, the frequency, the hours, travel, the level of assistance expected and, where relevant, how many people are concerned. The levels themselves depend entirely on the local market: no reference price exists, and no hourly rate holds from one country to another.

This is not a cleaning service, and it is not care

Two boundaries frame this trade, and it defines itself between them.

On one side, a cleaning service concerns the home: surfaces, floors, bathrooms, laundry. That is a neighbouring trade, and this activity often includes some of it. But a home helper does not stop there: she does the shopping, prepares meals, accompanies someone to an appointment, keeps them company. The beneficiary is no longer just a home, it is a person.

On the other side, care begins. A dressing, an injection, a clinical assessment, adjusting a treatment: these are acts for health professionals, according to the qualifications required and the locally applicable regulatory framework.

Between the two lies the zone this trade genuinely occupies: helping someone move around their home, preparing a meal suited to a diet indicated by a professional, reminding them of an appointment, being present. More extensive personal assistance — help with washing, for instance — is not improvised: it requires a prior assessment, the explicit agreement of the person concerned, and the honesty to say when the situation exceeds what can be provided.

The moment the service changes nature

That moment almost always comes, and it comes gradually.

An independent person growing older, a convalescent whose condition worsens, someone whose mobility is reducing: the same service, in the same home, at the same hours, slowly stops matching what was agreed.

A professional recognises that drift and says so — to the beneficiary first, to the family next. Flagging it is not losing a client: it is avoiding finding yourself one day alone with a situation you have neither the training nor the right to take on. It is also what allows the family to arrange something else in time, with the competent professionals.

Errands and other people's money

The moment you handle someone else's money you need a method, and it is a simple one.

What is agreed in advance: the sum entrusted, what it is meant to cover, what can be decided without approval and what must be asked. What is done every time: bringing back the receipts, returning the change, recording the spending, and never mixing that money with your own.

What is never done: holding a confidential code, using a payment method in someone else's name, or keeping login details. A home helper who needs to pay is given a sum for that purpose, not access to the person's accounts.

That discipline protects the helper first. In a trade where you are alone in someone's home, a written record beats the best reputation on the day a doubt arises.

A home is not a workplace like any other

You see everything there: money troubles, conflicts, health, documents left on a table.

Confidentiality is therefore a professional skill, not a moral quality. What you see in someone's home is not recounted elsewhere — not to neighbours, not to other clients, not on social media. The home is not photographed, and nothing concerning the person is published.

Access follows the same requirement: knowing who holds a key or a code, recording handover and return, limiting the number of people involved, agreeing what happens if a key is lost, and returning the means of access when the work ends. Some parts of the home may be expressly out of bounds, and that is respected without asking why.

Employed, self-employed, or working for a business

Three situations coexist and carry neither the same rights nor the same obligations.

The International Labour Organization's Domestic Workers Convention No. 189, adopted in 2011 with Recommendation No. 201, is the international reference framework: it recognises the special conditions under which domestic work is carried out and sets out provisions on decent work. It is not, however, a law automatically applicable everywhere; what applies depends on each country's legislation.

The same organisation's report, Care work and care jobs for the future of decent work, published in 2018 from data collected in more than ninety countries, analyses paid and unpaid care work and addresses the quality of jobs in the sector explicitly.

One useful point: status is not declared into existence. It depends on the contract, on the applicable labour law and on the reality of the relationship — who sets the hours, who provides the equipment, who gives the instructions. Going through a digital platform does not automatically turn someone into a self-employed worker.

In the African context

Conditions vary sharply between countries, cities and households: there is no single African market for home help, and the same service does not cover the same thing from one place to another.

The first reality is how wide the expected scope is. Depending on the market, one person may be asked to handle housekeeping, shopping, meals, watching a child and accompanying an older relative, sometimes in a single day. That versatility is an economic reality, not an anomaly; but it makes the written list all the more necessary, failing which the workload accumulates while neither the pay nor the hours move.

The second is the form of employment. The International Labour Organization documents the scale of informal employment in its statistical study on women and men in the informal economy, and home help is a common example: many relationships rest on a verbal agreement, with no written scope and no record of payment. That situation is identical nowhere, and it is changing: depending on the city, agencies are forming, offering cover for absence and issuing invoices — which creates a different offer rather than mere competition.

The third is demand created by distance. In several contexts, family members work in another city or another country, and are looking for someone reliable to be with a relative who stayed behind. That client is never present: what they are mainly buying is information. A regular handover, a message after each visit, a photograph of a shopping receipt are then worth more than any sales argument.

The fourth is digital, useful unevenly across markets. Messaging serves to agree an hour, warn of a delay, report to a distant family; mobile payment allows regular, traceable settlement, including from abroad. The International Telecommunication Union puts the share of the world's population using the Internet at 74 per cent in 2025, with 36 per cent for Africa, the lowest of the regions it measures: these channels matter where they exist, without replacing a written scope. One reservation goes with that use: a person's health, exact address, daily routine and documents have no business circulating in group conversations.

Finally, professionalisation is a concrete and gradual opportunity. It does not start with setting up a company: it starts with a written scope, hours that are kept, receipts, reachable references and a clear course of action for incidents. Depending on the country, formalisation can then take very different forms — individual status, cooperative, agency — and it is access to demanding clients that makes it pay, well before any obligation does.

What a home helper does not promise

She promises no act of care, no medical opinion, no assessment of a person's health, no decision about a treatment, and no handling of a situation beyond what was agreed and assessed. She stands in neither for a health professional, nor an emergency service, nor the family for the decisions that are theirs.

What she does commit to can be checked: a written scope, agreed hours, a clear method for money entrusted to her, confidentiality kept, serious management of access, a report when the situation changes, and a receipt or invoice.

In case of an incident the course of action is the same as in the other home-based trades: recognise what exceeds your role, put the person reasonably out of harm's way without exposing yourself, alert the family or the designated contact, call the emergency services where necessary, and record what happened. The numbers and the services available depend on the country and the city: they are asked for at the start of the engagement, not improvised.

Artificial intelligence can help prepare a task list, a handover template, a schedule or a description of services. It does not see the home, does not assess a person's condition, does not decide that a situation is an emergency, and does not replace the judgement of the person who is there. A beneficiary's health information and personal documents have no business being passed to it.