World Bank Expert Roundtable

Care Economy: current and future impacts on women’s time and economic participation

25 February 2009

Presentation on:

Financing unpaid care work

Anna FälthUNDP Gender Team, Bureau for Development Policy

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Financing unpaid care work…

1. ‘WHAT’?2. ‘BY WHOM’?3. Tools for ‘WHAT’ and ‘BY WHOM’ 4. Recommendations

Presentation Outline

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Conceptual Framework of UNDP

Recognize

RedistributeReduce

WHAT

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UNDP Home-based Care Project, in collaboration with the Huairou Commission. Cameroon, Kenya, Nigeria, Rwanda, Uganda and Zimbabwe

Support community-led research: to quantify the contributions of grassroot women care-givers caring for people living with HIV/AIDS.

Peer-to-peer learning processes;

Help the caregivers to inform policy makers of the practical on-the-ground coping strategies they use to care for people living with HIV/AIDS;

Work with policy makers so that local realities are included in planning and funding mechanisms.

Compensation: some home-based care workers want to be individually compensated (however, risk to reinforce existing gender stereotypes), and others advocate for compensation of cooperatives of unpaid caregivers.

Home-based care is seen as a cheap alternative, but in reality, it shifts the cost of care from hospitals to caregivers in form of unpaid care work.

UNDP Project

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BY WHOM

Not-for-profit

Family/household

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Public sector

Markets (formal and informal) (€ $)

Size of formal and informal sectors affects the burden of unpaid work

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BY WHOM (cont’d)

Variety of combinations of paid and unpaid work:

•Family/households: unpaid work, mostly by women and girls. Well-educated/high income women have more flexibility to outsource care than poorly educated/low income women.

• Non-for-profit: often unpaid work: community provision, charities, NGOs, religious organizations.

• Markets: paid work in various care occupations (nurses, domestic workers, etc.) Substitute services that women once provided in the home.

• Public sector: paid work, e.g. care for young children in crèches, pre-schools, care for elderly, people with disabilities (mostly in developed countries)

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UNDP projectResearch project on the Political and Social Economy of Care

• UNDP in collaboration with IDRC and UNRISD in Argentina, India, Nicaragua, South Africa, Tanzania and the Republic of Korea

• Analysising the key insitutions of the ‘Care Diamond’ (diff. combinations);

Who are the main care providers (disag. by sex, age, income, HH structure, race/ethnicity…)?;

How much time do they spend on unpaid and paid work?;What is the value of time spend on unpaid work? (in monetary terms, in

comparison with GDP, paid work, government tax revenue, government expenditure on care-related personnel, etc.)

• What kinds of policies are needed to support the unpaid economy and to transform it along more gender-egalitarian lines?

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Tools for WHAT and BY WHOM

Time use surveysCost-benefit analysis

Gender-responsive budget tools

Informs policy making, planning and budget processes

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Tools for WHAT and BY WHOM (cont’d)

Benefit incidence analysis (distribution of budget resources among males and females)

Beneficiary Assessment (views of users, right spending?)

Public expenditure tracking survey (if funds earmarked for a special purpose, do they reach the intended service units?)

Time use analysis (how government resource allocation and revenue raising patterns impact on the amount of different types of paid and unpaid work done and the way that time is spent by women and men)

Revenue incidence analysis (if women and men are affected differently by the kind of revenues raised by governments)

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ECUADOR

Time-use study:

Study measures the impact of structural adjustment programmes:

Social spending cuts Women had to spend more time shopping (for cheaper items) and cooking (bought less processed food) increased time spent on unpaid work daughters to help mothers less girls in school

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Recommendations

Possible policy interventions and investments:

Cash payments to caregivers (e.g. child benefits, pensions)Time and labour saving technologies;Taxation allowancesPaid leave from employmentSocial security creditsProvision of subsidized care servicesEducation (incl. school meals and continuous day free up time that otherwise would be unpaid care work)

Interventions target both women and men.