Lightening the load: addressing rural women’s work burden and time poverty

However, in most developing countries, women work longer hours than men when both paid and unpaid work is taken into consideration. Much of this work—which reflects rural women’s triple work burden in the productive, reproductive and social spheres—consists of laborious and repetitive domestic tasks that are less visible, unpaid, and severely restrictive of their time and mobility. The fact that rural women spend more time in order to produce less has broad implications for the food and nutrition security, prosperity, health and well-being of themselves, their families and their communities.

Two recent publications from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) provide a comprehensive overview of the causes, implications and constraints related to rural women’s time poverty in agriculture, while also reviewing solutions that can help empower and enable them to reduce their work burden and free up time and energy for activities of greater value:

• Running out of time: the reduction of women's work burden in agricultural production 
• Addressing women’s work burden: key issues, promising solutions and way forward

Positive impact for agricultural production

The two publications draw on a wealth of research to make a compelling case for addressing women’s time poverty and work burden, not only with respect to the potential for positive impact in agricultural production, but also for the benefits foreseen in many other spheres.

Indeed, when their work burden is reduced, women use the freed time in a variety of ways, including additional care work (of children, the elderly, and the sick); wage labour and entrepreneurship (for increased household income); awareness raising, community mobilization and social activities; education; and leisure. In Viet Nam, for instance, when time spent on hand weeding was reduced, more time was allocated to child care, income-generating and community activities.

Both publications identify specific practices, technologies and services that have proven successful in reducing women’s work burden and/or time poverty. These include agricultural systems or techniques such as aquaponics, conservation agriculture, kitchen and keyhole gardens, and rice-fish farming; as well as equipment, technologies or tools such as weeders, water wheels and mobile water tanks. 

But despite these success cases, the adoption rate for innovative time- and labour-saving agricultural technologies and services remains low. This is because women face a variety of barriers and constraints in their access to and adoption of solutions, many of which are context-specific and complex.

Sometimes a tool is inappropriate – and sometimes it gets appropriated...

Social norms, for example, can often inhibit women’s access to and adoption of certain technologies, tools, and services. In many parts of West Africa, it is considered inappropriate for women to use long-handled hoes. And among some ethnic groups in Burkina Faso, women are prohibited from riding bicycles. Social norms may also affect other, more general restrictions on mobility and on associating with non-family members – all of which can pose barriers to women’s adoption of new technologies or services.

Household dynamics may also play a role. Men tend to manage other family members’ use of technology and tools, and often appropriate them for their own use – either because they attribute social importance to their use, or because they see income-generating potential. For example, a project in South Africa provided women with donkey carts to help them with fuelwood collection, but the move backfired, because their husbands appropriated the carts to collect and sell wood found closer to home – forcing the women to travel even farther than before to find wood.

On the other hand, a project to improve communication among rural Cambodian women was able to address this kind of problem head-on: they distributed pink cell phones to the women, thereby making the phones less attractive to men and ensuring that the phones would remain in the hands of the women.

A gender-sensitive approach is therefore crucial to understanding the different barriers and constraints that women face. It also helps to ensure that interventions do not inadvertently increase women’s time poverty or work burden, or result in other negative consequences, whether direct or indirect.

This was illustrated by a project in Zambia, where women are in charge of processing maize: when an “improved” hybrid variety was introduced, it effectively increased their work burden, because it required more time and effort to pound than the variety grown previously.

In a similar vein, participatory consultation can prove instrumental in ensuring context-specific, culturally responsive approaches. In the Syrian Arab Republic, for example, prior consultations with women established that they were not in favour of mechanizing the lentil harvesting process, as they feared they would lose their income-generating jobs to men.

Indeed, in some settings, women may in fact appreciate or even prefer to continue performing certain chores. The custom of collecting water at a river, for example, may offer a valuable opportunity for social time and for information exchange with peers.