blog – Care Economy Africa

Valuing domestic work as a springboard for gender equity strategies

admin — Wed, 05 Jun 2024 11:44:53 +0000

Valuing domestic work,

a springboard for gender equity strategies

By Edmée Marthe Ndoye

In 2019, the ILO’s Breakthrough Report on Gender Equality, recognizes that the greatest source of inequality between men and women worldwide is the burden of Unpaid Domestic Work (UDW) placed on women, and in particular, caregiving activities. This recognition is a major step forward in the feminist struggle for greater recognition of the domestic work performed by women, which has long remained invisible.

The domestic work in question is to be distinguished from the work of domestic servants, which is paid. By unpaid domestic work, we mean any domestic activity for which there is no monetary consideration, which is not taken into account in the national accounts and which can be carried out by a third party (Donehower, 2019), such as doing the laundry, cleaning, cooking, shopping, looking after and caring for children, the elderly, the sick, the disabled, in a family or community setting: all activities that are classified as “domestic”, which classification can be found in ICATUS 2017 (International Classification of Activities for Time-Use Statistics).

As part of the Counting Women’s Work (CWW) project, the Consortium Régional pour la Recherche en Économie Générationnelle (CREG) has appropriated the domestic work valuation tool developed under the project to assess women’s contribution to the Senegalese economy through unpaid domestic work.

How can we add value to domestic work?

On my way to work one morning, I bumped into an acquaintance and asked him about his wife. He replied: “She’s at home doing nothing”. Yet this wife didn’t have a maid. This implies that the work done by the wife all day long has little or no value in the eyes of the husband and even the community.

Indeed, valuation is the act of putting a value on something. The CWW Project and the National Time Transfer Accounts (NTTA) are working to develop this tool.

The NTTA is a tool for assessing the amount of unpaid domestic work performed by men and women at all ages. It complements the National Transfer Accounts (NTA), which failed to take effective account of gender inequalities. The NTA retrace the evolution of production and consumption of goods and services, as well as the distribution of savings at all ages in a given economy (Dramani 2019).

To value unpaid domestic work, we can consider the tariff of the activity specialist or that of the generalist. The former differs from the latter in that it pays for a service relating to a given domestic activity. The latter refers to the hourly rate of a household helper paid to carry out work on several domestic activities. The NTTA method uses specialist costing. But in the context of African countries, the valuation method favors the cost of the generalist, due to the scarcity, if not non-existence, of specialists in paid domestic activities..

What data should be used to value domestic working time?

The preferred data for valuing domestic working time are those obtained from time-use surveys. These provide detailed information on the various activities performed by the respondent during the day. The main challenge in these surveys is the treatment of simultaneous activities, which some authors agree make up at least a third of the day’s activities (Kenyon 2010).

Furthermore, time-use surveys are non-existent in most African countries. The majority of studies relating to unpaid domestic work use data from modules dedicated to time use in household surveys carried out in these countries. In Senegal, the data used to assess women’s contribution to the economy through TDNR comes from the EHCVM 2018.

Over the life cycle, the amount of TDNR produced by women can reach over 22 hours a week, compared with around 3 hours for men.

The results obtained above are taken from the National Time Transfer Accounts (NTTA) carried out in 2018 by CREG. The National Time Transfer Accounts track production, consumption and transfer flows of unpaid domestic working time.

They reveal that in Senegal, domestic work is carried out predominantly by women over most of the life cycle. Women produce (solid red curve) more time in unpaid domestic work than they consume (dotted red curve). In other words, women devote more of their time to domestic activities than they benefit from. The opposite phenomenon is observed in the case of men, who over the entire life cycle consume more TDNR time than they produce. A 32-year-old woman spends an average of over 22 hours a week on domestic activities, while her counterpart of the same age spends less than 3 hours a week.

When we look at the consumption of domestic work time, we see that the optimal peaks are devoted to youth, between 0 and 2 years of age for all genders, and to old age from 63 onwards. This reveals the high demand for domestic care time during these periods of life.

Table 1: Production and consumption of domestic work in

Based on the principle that any TDNR time produced is inevitably consumed, we can therefore conclude that significant demand for TDNR time is covered by women’s production.

Women’s contribution estimated at 17% of 2018 GDP, compared with 2% for men

In monetary terms, the table below shows the value of women’s and men’s domestic work for each activity.

This means that women outnumber men in all domestic activities. However, the domestic activities that consume the most time and account for most of the value of domestic work are housework and personal care. Women’s contribution to the latter is respectively 13 times and 9 times greater in monetary terms than that of men.

Table 2: Valuation of domestic time: production by activity and gender in Senegal in 2018

In total, unpaid domestic work stands at 2374.333 billion FCFA for the 2018 account. This sum represents 19% of GDP, i.e. 17% for women and 2% for men.

Recommendations

These results show that women are time-poor, as they spend most of their time in TDNR. For greater gender equity in access to the labor market, public policies must take account of TDNR as a “social good” that contributes to the population’s well-being. This could be achieved through subsidies for TDNR, greater formalization of the care sector and investment in quality domestic work, in particular the personal care sector, including early childhood education establishments, crèches and care facilities for the elderly and disabled.

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Care Economy in Africa at the heart of discussions

Valuing domestic work as a springboard for gender equity strategies

Second Edition of the NTA Africa 2021 conference: A young researcher shares her experience

admin — Wed, 05 Jun 2024 11:41:06 +0000

Second edition of the NTA Africa 2021 conference:

sharing the experience of a young researcher

By Amandine Cynthia P. YANOGO,

Doctoral student in development economics

1. As a young researcher, what does it mean to you to be taking part in this event organized by the CREG?

Taking part in the NTA conference was a great opportunity. Indeed, it was an opportunity for us to deepen our knowledge of population issues and better orient our academic research. We were also able to draw inspiration from the experiences of other countries and the policy measures they have implemented to address demographic issues.

2. You’ve worked on issues relating to the valorization of domestic work. In your opinion, what are the major challenges facing women’s domestic work, particularly unpaid work in Africa?

Major challenges include, but are not limited to:

Low school enrolment among girls,
Lower living standards for women,
Low participation/presence of women in the paid labor market,
Low empowerment of women.

3. How widespread is this phenomenon in Burkina Faso, and what policy measures can you recommend?

In Burkina Faso, women are primarily involved in managing the family, education, food and childcare in the various socio-cultural specificities (Ouoba et al., 2003).
These activities contribute to excluding women from the field of gainful employment, in contrast to men, who are considered income earners (INSD, 2006), and exacerbate gender inequalities.

« These inequalities were highlighted in the paid labor market by the 2016 Demographic Dividend profile, which showed that 69% of labor income is generated by men versus 31% by women, and that women are almost in deficit over their entire life cycle.

Domestic work includes tasks such as cleaning, cooking, washing and ironing clothes, caring for children, the elderly and the sick, gardening, fetching water and wood. »

So, in terms of policy measures, we recommend :

Promoting the intensive use of butane gas, which will protect the plant cover and reduce the time spent cooking;
Increase water coverage, especially in rural areas, to reduce the distance and time needed to obtain water;
Strengthening the operation and provision of crèches for all social strata;
The introduction of a home medical monitoring system for the elderly.

4. The conference was an opportunity to rub shoulders with researchers and policy-makers. How did this benefit your research?

The NTA_Africa 2021 conference provided an opportunity to improve our paper on the demographic changes presented at the conference, and to familiarize ourselves with other econometric models. Secondly, it was an opportunity to share experiences on the challenges of demographic issues for African development, which will enable us to broaden our fields of research.

5. How can the CREG’s Counting women’s work blog bridge the gap between the capitalization of researchers’ knowledge and its translation into action?

To this end, CREG’s Counting women’s Work blog could :

Promote the sharing of experience ;
Establish a network of researchers interested in population and development issues, and involve the National Observatories on the Demographic Dividend (ONDD), as this would not only enable countries to share their experiences on demographic dividend issues, but would also help guide decision-making to address population and development issues.

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Care Economy in Africa at the heart of discussions

Valuing domestic work as a springboard for gender equity strategies

Second Edition of the NTA Africa 2021 conference: A young researcher shares her experience

PRB’s role in the Counting Women’s Work project

admin — Wed, 05 Jun 2024 11:25:44 +0000

PRB's role in the Counting Women's Work project

An interview with Aïssata Fall – PRB Regional Representative for West and Central Africa

By Charlotte Greenbaum

What is PRB's role in the project?

PRB is responsible for the Hewlett Foundation grant and, in partnership with UCB and CREG, provides technical assistance to research teams in Côte d’Ivoire, Mali, Niger, Togo, Benin and Senegal on the analysis of national transfer accounts and women’s unpaid work time – i.e. time spent caring for the family – and links with economic growth.

« PRB particularly supports the development of research application plans and the communication of results to policy-makers. »

Why is women's unpaid work such an important issue in West Africa?

Research into women’s unpaid work offers an innovative perspective for broadening policy dialogue on the importance of reconsidering women’s place and economic function within the household when formulating social policy objectives or health policies, for example, to enable them to play their full part in inclusive economic growth.

The added value of women’s unpaid work, in particular for the good health and well-being of families – two conditions for the effective participation of family members in growth – is not “naturally” taken into account in high-level discussions on economic development. No thought is given to considering the “work” value of caring for the whole family, while securing indispensable social ties with the community.

Yet it is these same women who, among other things, guarantee the nutritional quality of meals, and pass on and enforce good hygiene practices. A role that proves crucial, for example, during crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet some of these women, who ensure the family’s stability and health, remain invisible in their own right because they are not linked to the employment sector. Housewives are still too widely considered to be only “in the community”, while community support is insufficient to meet their specific needs.

Talking about women’s unpaid work and its importance means making them visible in their social and economic function, and considering them fully as determining factors in economic growth.

I’ve worked for over 10 years on social protection policies and strategies for the most vulnerable, but I’ve never heard of valuing unpaid work related to family care. This would have enabled me to develop other arguments for the inclusion of social protection for the poorest in the national budget, but also to take a different approach to the categories targeted by certain interventions. Measuring this unpaid work makes it possible to put a value on this role played by women, and thus to better inform policy-making on issues of equity, work, well-being and economic growth – and also to argue the cost of inaction if this function is not supported in a relevant way by these same policies.

Why is political communication an important component of this particular project?

Strategic political communication is particularly important for this project, as the usual analyses of economic activity only include care work if it is provided for remuneration. What’s more, placing a monetary value on unpaid care work – the majority of which is performed by women – overturns the classic, culturally-rooted way of thinking about the value of tasks traditionally divided between men and women.

It is therefore essential to know how to use the data provided by research to describe its implications for the development goals set and the commitments made by governments. The use of strategic policy communication tools can streamline debates and support evidence-informed policy dialogue.

And beyond the creation of communication products, this political communication work is inseparable from the work of engaging the various stakeholders. For it is also important to support spaces for dialogue in which research findings or communication products will be used and debated to build a common understanding of the importance of women’s unpaid work.

What is your vision for the blog and for the impact of the project more broadly?

I hope that the project and this blog will help to increase interest in unpaid work, but also to give greater visibility to the work carried out by African researchers in French-speaking countries.

Dedicating a French-language blog to the subject provides a forum for discussion for researchers in the region, who are at a significant disadvantage compared to their English-speaking colleagues, as research is primarily published and discussed in English.

This blog is also a less formal space for the various players in the project to express their opinions, while remaining a space whose quality is guaranteed by the fact that it is hosted by the CREG, which, as an affiliate of several international organizations, offers an interesting showcase for French-speaking researchers.

Beyond women’s unpaid work, the blog will also inform and discuss the importance of evidence-based policy-making. I also hope it will raise questions about the effective use of the vast amount of research that has been carried out, but which all too often goes unheeded.

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Care Economy in Africa at the heart of discussions

Valuing domestic work as a springboard for gender equity strategies

Second Edition of the NTA Africa 2021 conference: A young researcher shares her experience

Counting Women’s Work the road travelled

admin — Wed, 05 Jun 2024 11:13:36 +0000

Counting Women’s Work

the road travelled

By Gretchen Donehower

The generational and gender economy

I made my way slowly across the campus of the East-West Center in Honolulu, Hawaii, to the 10th World Workshop of the National Transfer Accounts (NTA) project. It was June 2010 and the last conference I would attend before going on maternity leave for my second child. I was feeling huge and Hawaii was hot.

« The NTA project is about understanding the generational economy – how we produce, consume, share and save resources by age – and after working on this project for over a decade in countries around the world, we’d learned a lot. We’d created data tools that showed us how governments and families support us when we’re too young or too old to work, how these systems differ across time and space, and how all this impacts on economic growth and sustainability. »

This was particularly relevant to me at the time, as my young family was growing and facing the challenge of how to pay for everything. We were also faced with the challenge of finding the time to do it all – caring for our children, doing our paid work, preparing for our own aging and retirement one day, and the possibility of also having to care for aging parents.

The overlap between my life and my work increased because I had to chair the NTA research network’s efforts to extend our work to include gender. The gender dimension of economies differs in time and space, as does the generational economy, and there are institutions that shape it. Cultural norms, legal institutions and biological differences influence individuals and lead men and women, girls and boys, to participate differently in our economies. Having children has made me understand many of these differences in a very concrete way.

At the time, the NTA research network included teams of researchers in over 40 countries (today there are teams in almost 100 countries), from all regions of the world. Network members specializing in economics, demography and other fields set out to integrate a gender perspective into the existing study of generational economics.

Unpaid care work is key to understanding the gender economy

It was clear to us from the outset that understanding the gendered economy would pose a major challenge to the way we had studied generational economics. The only part of “the economy” we were measuring in the NTA was that defined by existing measures such as gross domestic product and other market-based measures that form the backbone of macroeconomics.

Our picture of the generational economy begins by disaggregating these and other measures by age. Adding gender to the table using only these measures showed us one aspect of the gendered economy: on average, men produced more in the labor market than women at almost all ages and in almost all countries. What’s more, in the years when their incomes were highest, men produced much more than they consumed, using the surplus to save and make transfers through families and governments to other age groups and to women. In most countries, on the other hand, women, even at the peak of their earnings, generated virtually no surplus. Although the size of this gap varied from country to country, it remained true in rich and poor countries, in countries with more or less egalitarian gender cultures, and in all regions of the world.

What’s missing from this image? Unpaid care work. Women specialize in unpaid work such as caring for children and the elderly, maintaining and managing household life. Researchers had long recognized the need to make this sector of the economy visible, by developing “satellite accounts of domestic production” to measure its value. This method uses time-use surveys to estimate the time people spend on unpaid care work, both direct care of people and indirect care through housework and household management, and then assigns a monetary value to this work as the amount of money someone would earn for it in return for payment.

Counting Women's Work mapping the gender economy

Thanks to an initial grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation in 2014, the Counting Women’s Work (CWW) project began to integrate the gender perspective and unpaid care work into the National Transfer Accounts project. Led by research groups at UC Berkeley and the University of Cape Town, national research teams worked to see how we could create comparative estimates across countries of how production, consumption and transfers of market goods and services and unpaid care work time differed by age and gender. This work provided important insights into unpaid care work and the gendered economy:

Unpaid care work represents a substantial proportion of all work effort, ranging from 30% to 60% of total time worked in a diverse group of countries.
Most unpaid care work is done by women and girls, while men and boys specialize in market work.
As young as time-use surveys can measure, girls perform more unpaid care tasks than boys.
Unpaid care work creates future human capital, particularly in the first years of life. For example, if we value unpaid care time at the salary of an educator, 90% of the cost of an infant’s first year of life is unpaid care work.
Older people, and older women in particular, perform a large proportion of unpaid care work. In most countries, older women spend more time on unpaid care work than they consume until they are in their late sixties or older.

Making women's work count in politics

One of CWW’s important impacts to date has been to recognize unpaid care work as work, and to highlight the value of women’s contributions in this sector. Going forward, we’re focusing on specific ways in which understanding the gendered economy can help shape better policies. As policy impacts depend on the specific needs and context of each country involved in the project, what is the role of the project team still based at UC Berkeley? Our goal is to maintain Counting Women’s Work as a source of high-quality data on the gendered economy, accessible to people around the world who are striving to understand gender in their societies and the policies that shape them. This broad objective is supported by a number of activities:

Provide technical assistance to research teams implementing the methods developed by Counting Women’s Work.
Guarantee the quality of estmations, particularly in terms of cross-country comparability.
Maintain the project website at www.countingwomenswork.org with its database of comparative estimates.
Develop and implement methods to make CWW more relevant to decision-makers, such as estimates for targeted sub-groups or particular types of unpaid care work, or specific policy issues.
Monitor information opportunities via social media, specially designed apps and in-person or online conferences, to raise awareness of the project and promote project participants through global and regional networks as gender economy experts.

Essentially, I work to develop the Counting Women’s Work “brand” through our data and through our people. The stronger this brand becomes, the more it can act to create gender-sensitive policies, monitoring and societies around the world. While the young people I care for at home are no longer babies, questions of care, paid and unpaid, given and received, are still central to my work and my life.

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Care Economy in Africa at the heart of discussions

Valuing domestic work as a springboard for gender equity strategies

Second Edition of the NTA Africa 2021 conference: A young researcher shares her experience

CREG: An African Center of Excellence on Generational Economy Issues

admin — Wed, 05 Jun 2024 11:06:09 +0000

CREG

an African center of excellence on Generative Economy issues

By Edmée Marthe Ndoye

The Regional Consortium for Research in Generational Economics (CREG) is a center of excellence for research in generational economics created by the National Transfer Accounts (NTA) network. The network is co-directed by Professor Andrew Mason of the University of Hawaii at Manoa (USA) and Professor Ronald Lee of the University of California at Berkeley (USA), and brings together researchers from 98 countries in 2021 around the world working on demo-economic issues.

« Work on generational economics has the advantage of integrating age into national accounts, compared with the standard National Accounts approach. This is how the NTA network came up with the National Transfer Accounts, which make it possible to assess, at each age, how individuals produce, consume, share resources and save for their future. »

The relevance of the network’s studies is reflected in the importance of population issues in development thinking. Indeed, developing countries in general, and African countries in particular, are undergoing a demographic transition that will considerably alter their population structure. If the right economic and social policy measures are effectively implemented, these countries could harness or optimize their demographic potential in terms of inclusive economic growth and harmonious, sustainable economic and social development. This phenomenon, known as the demographic dividend, emerged from the experience of the Asian tigers, who experienced a meteoric rise in economic growth following a fall in the total fertility rate in their countries (Bloom, 2003).

As the African representative of the NTA network, CREG’s mission is to help African countries understand, in the context of demographic transition, how population dynamics affect economic growth, education, health, intergenerational equity and gender equality and equity. The latter, in particular, is now a fundamental issue in the quest for economic and social development.

As part of its mission, CREG has forged strong partnerships with development players such as UNFPA – through the Sahel Women’s Empowerment and Demographic Dividend (SWEDD) Project -, UN Women, the Ouagadougou Partnership , but also with universities and gender research institutes, notably the Levy Institute of Bard College, the University of Toronto with the Care Economy project, and the University of California at Berkeley as part of the Counting Women’s Work project. In view of the importance of domestic work in the implementation of economic and social welfare policies, CREG is also collaborating with the Population Reference Bureau (PRB) on the implementation of research implementation plans to increase the commitment of policy-makers to take better account of unpaid domestic work.

The Counting Women's Work (CWW) project

The CWW is part of the NTA project on which CREG is working in partnership with the University of California at Berkeley and PRB. It was prompted by the failure to take account of women’s invisible work, unpaid domestic work, in the NTA analysis. As a result, the National Time Transfer Accounts (NTTA) methodology was developed to understand how men and women, girls and boys produce, consume and transfer domestic care and other services for the benefit of the household itself.

A combination of NTA and NTTA allows us to conceptualize and estimate the transfer of time and money. The result is a more complete picture of economic and social life, and a better consideration of women’s work.

Related issues addressed by National Time Transfer Accounts (NTTA)

Apart from NTTA, there are a multitude of approaches to gender analysis, but these do not take generational aspects into account. Thus, studies based on the NTTA approach are all the more relevant as they address important issues of unpaid domestic work, including:

What impact can inequalities in the burden of unpaid domestic work between men and women, girls and boys, have on household well-being, the demographic dividend and the economy as a whole?
What happens if the burden of unpaid domestic work does not fall as women’s paid work increases?
What trade-offs should countries make to favor family-friendly policies in this changing social context?
What protection systems should be put in place to ensure social equity by taking unpaid domestic work into account?

In view of the demographic and social changes taking place in our societies, it seems essential to answer these questions in the quest for sustainable economic and social development that leaves no one behind.

blog – Care Economy Africa

Valuing domestic work as a springboard for gender equity strategies

Valuing domestic work,

By Edmée Marthe Ndoye

How can we add value to domestic work?

What data should be used to value domestic working time?

Table 1: Production and consumption of domestic work in

Table 2: Valuation of domestic time: production by activity and gender in Senegal in 2018

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Second Edition of the NTA Africa 2021 conference: A young researcher shares her experience

Second edition of the NTA Africa 2021 conference:

By Amandine Cynthia P. YANOGO,

Doctoral student in development economics

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PRB’s role in the Counting Women’s Work project

PRB's role in the Counting Women's Work project

By Charlotte Greenbaum

What is PRB's role in the project?

Why is women's unpaid work such an important issue in West Africa?

Why is political communication an important component of this particular project?

What is your vision for the blog and for the impact of the project more broadly?

Share this article via :

read also :

Counting Women’s Work the road travelled

Counting Women’s Work

By Gretchen Donehower

The generational and gender economy

Unpaid care work is key to understanding the gender economy

Counting Women's Work mapping the gender economy

Making women's work count in politics

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read also:

CREG: An African Center of Excellence on Generational Economy Issues

CREG

By Edmée Marthe Ndoye

The Counting Women's Work (CWW) project

Related issues addressed by National Time Transfer Accounts (NTTA)

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