With the aim of reducing women’s greater unpaid care work than men’s and increasing women’s paid employment, this paper examines the extent to which World Bank investments address unpaid care work. Based on in-depth gender analysis of 36 Bank projects, our research concludes that only three (8%) of the 36 reviewed projects explicitly seek to reduce women’s care-related time poverty, while the remaining 33 (92%) fail to explicitly account for unpaid care work in project design. Despite strong Bank rhetoric on the importance of addressing or alleviating women’s care work, including integrating simple time-saving technologies, orienting infrastructure projects around women’s most time-consuming daily responsibilities, and providing childcare to improve women’s labour market access, care work is largely overlooked in actual project implementation. The result is that Bank projects continue to undervalue women’s essential but unpaid contributions, further restricting their employment and human development opportunities.
Time-use surveys extensively document SSA women’s extremely disproportionate responsibility for unpaid care work that hinders achieving gender equality and economic and human development. Reducing and better yet eliminating these gender divisions of labour that saddle women with unpaid care responsibilities is more relevant than ever. Government’s insufficient expenditure on essential social services, climate-related depletion of basic water, fuel, and food resources, and high HIV/AIDS infection rates all combine to increase care related demands on women’s time. Despite the fact that women’s time poverty remains a significant barrier to accessing quality employment opportunities, this paper finds that the Bank largely overlooks care work in its investments.
The study recommends that all Bank investments must:
- Respect and promote women’s human rights, especially rights to work, favourable working conditions, equal pay for equal work, education, as well as rest and leisure.
- Value and reward all care work.
- Provide grants, not loans, to impoverished countries to free up funds for child, disabled and elder care as well as other social spending.
- Proactively engage women ‘beneficiaries’ in all project cycle stages from design to monitoring and evaluation, as well as other female stakeholders including community leaders.
- Make full use of robust sex-disaggregated data to guide project design, monitor progress, and identify gender gaps in employment, income and differential impacts on economic growth and wellbeing.
- Expand WDI to measure the time women and men spend contributing to unpaid care work.
Agriculture-related investments must:
- Implement time-saving technologies that respond to men’s and women’s distinct agricultural roles.
- Assess all labour inputs required for crop production, and ensure that neither sex, male or female, absorbs disproportionate burden for producing labour intensive cash crops.
- Conduct gender analysis, including use of time-use surveys, to ensure that women and men equally benefit from and neither is harmed by agricultural activities.
- Organize project producer, and community-based meetings that fit women’s time-constraints.
- Ensure that capacity-building sessions are accessible to women, and do not add to their work day.
Infrastructure-related investments must:
- Implement time-use surveys to identify distinct infrastructure priorities, transport patterns, and time spent carrying out gendered responsibilities.
- Ensure that infrastructure privatization and tariff schemes are accompanied by public subsidies for poor men or women’s access to basic infrastructure.
- Conduct gender analysis, including use of individual time-use surveys, to ensure that women and men equally benefit from and are not harmed by infrastructure investments.
- Organize project community-based meetings to fit women’s time constraints.
Education-related investments must:
- Ensure that vocational training does not advance traditional gender roles.
- Monitor girls’ and boys’ differential rates of school retention and achievement as well as target interventions to respond to seasonal fluctuations in crop harvesting, gendered divisions of labour, etc.
- Increase schemes to reduce false ‘opportunity costs’ of sending girls to school, such as providing meals or stipends for school attendance.
- Place greater emphasis on gender-sensitive curriculum and female teachers and management, which dispel the stereotype of girls as caregivers.
Policy investments must:
- Halt cuts to public social spending and privatization and user fees that curtail health, education, and other social services, which disproportionately impact women as caregivers.
- Implement gender budgeting that incorporates gender analysis of household time use.
- Develop banking and finance practices that account for unpaid care-related restrictions to credit, such as weak access to collateral or other resources.
- Proactively promote women as leaders from community to national levels.
- Advance quality care policies and programmes to improve human development and expand paid employment.