Unpaid Care Work Programme: Nepal Progress Report (2012–13)

The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 2001

2014

The gap between thinking and programming around these two agendas is most visible in early childhood development (ECD) policies. A recent review of all ECD policies in low and middle income countries found that unpaid care was invisible within most policy statements and measured outcomes. Of 263 policies reviewed, only 40 had explicitly recognised that unpaid care concerns were intrinsically linked to early childhood development. For child rights programming, this is vital because the invisibility of unpaid care work within ECD policies helps explain why some programmes achieve such limited success: programmes which increase the net burden of unpaid care work are unlikely to succeed.

SSRN Electronic Journal

Using data from the Nepal Living Standards Survey (NLSS)-III-2010/11 this study examines the effect of unpaid care work on the capability of care providers to earn a living and to attain tertiary education. The conceptual model, motivated by the Capability Approach, delineates contemporaneous and compounding effects of undertaking unpaid care work on the caregiver and its wider intergenerational and societal effects. Using an instrumental variables approach, the empirical analysis identifies adverse gender-differentiated effects of time devoted to caregiving: While women and men experience commensurate declines in their weekly employment hours, likelihood of employment and tertiary education decreases for women only. The study is one of the few least developed-country studies that use time-use survey data to examine causal effects of unpaid work, and the first study for Nepal. It draws attention of policymakers to the adverse effects of care burden on individual well-being and its broader development outcomes in Nepal.

2014

The unpaid care work that women and girls do sustains families, communities and whole societies -and yet it has been consistently ignored and taken for granted in public policy and in development efforts. It appears that now, finally, there is an emerging consensus around its importance, based on an ever-growing body of evidence on the impact of unpaid care work on gender equality, women's rights and poverty.

2016

In order to address ‘heavy’ and ‘unequal’ care work and to raise the profile of care as a cross-cutting development issue, Oxfam and its partners implemented a baseline Household Care Survey (HCS) in five countries in which the WE-Care project was active. In November/December 2015, a revised version of the HCS was carried out in these same communities. As a follow-up survey, the 2015 HCS monitored change and impact from the project's interventions and gathered evidence on ‘what works’ to address care work in specific contexts. The aim is to generate evidence that helps local organizations address problematic aspects of care work, contributing to women’s ability to participate, lead and benefit from development initiatives. This evidence is then used to develop project interventions that recognize, reduce and redistribute existing unpaid care work within the household, the immediate community (civil society), the market (private sector) and the state authority (central and local ...

This paper seeks to lay bare the contours and consequences of the relationship between paid work and unpaid care work for women in low-income households, in order to better understand the relationship between women's participation in paid work and 'economic empowerment'. It is also interested in analysing whether, and if so how, women (may) achieve a positive balance between their unpaid care work and paid work responsibilities such that their economic empowerment is optimised (women's entry into paid work is enabled without deepening their time poverty or worrying about the quality of care received by their family), shared (across generations, so that other women/girls in the family are not left to bear the burden of care), and sustained (such that the quality of care provided to children improves as a result of their mother's paid work).

IDS Working Paper , 2017

This paper seeks to lay bare the contours and consequences of the relationship between paid work and unpaid care work for women in low income households, in order to better understand the relationship between women’s participation in paid work and ‘economic empowerment’. It is also interested in analysing whether, and if so how, women (may) achieve a positive balance between their unpaid care work and paid work responsibilities such that their economic empowerment is optimised (women’s entry into paid work is enabled without deepening their time poverty or worrying about the quality of care received by their family), shared (across generations, so that other women/girls in the family are not left to bear the burden of care) and sustained (such that the quality of care provided to children improves as a result of their mother’s paid work). The paper seeks to do this by mapping the social organisation of care in low income households across four sites in India, and assessing how women cope with their dual burdens. By focusing our analysis on two ‘women’s economic empowerment programmes’: the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) in Rajasthan and the Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) in Madhya Pradesh, we also seek to analyse how women’s economic empowerment policy and programming can generate a ‘double boon’: paid work that empowers women and provides more support for their unpaid care work responsibilities.

2015

Asian Social Work and Policy Review, 2022

According to a report by the International Labor Organization (ILO), unpaid care work (UCW) involves three primary classifications: (1) providing unpaid domestic services for household purposes, including child and elder care; (2) providing unpaid care services to one's own household members; and (3) providing community services and help to other households (Charmes, 2019). UCW among women is highly prevalent in South Asian countries, which are defined as Afghanistan,

2014

Despite the majority of Nepalese children struggling to meet basic needs there have been negligible attempts to examine the effectiveness of social policies for children in Nepal. Equally challenging is the use of inappropriate frameworks, primarily the UN-Child Rights Convention (UNCRC), the development approach, and a non-hierarchical notion of child well-being (CWB) to conceptualise such policies. This calls for alternate approaches such as welfare state frameworks (WSF) while formulating such policies. But despite the usefulness of WSF in combating absolute child poverty in the West these frameworks are rarely applied in the ‘developing’ world. Hence in the first of its kind this study uses the overall theoretical guidance of a WSF and specific theories of welfare state regime (Esping-Anderson, 1990) and welfare regime (Gough and Wood, 2004) to examine social policy and CWB in Nepal. This study uses a critical epistemology for investigation. Whilst the study is exploratory, it h...