Traditions and gender-insensitive policies burden women with hard work that doesn’t pay
By VICTOR OLUOCH
Expensive and inaccessible public services and infrastructure
shackling women to unpaid care and domestic work stand in Kenya’s way to
achieving its development goals, warns Oxfam.
“Inadequate water systems, fuel and cooking facilities result in women and girls having to make long and backbreaking daily trips to collect water and firewood, while under-funded health services mean they must walk miles to get medical care for their family,” notes Oxfam's policy brief released today.
The statement draws on
research and programming experience from Oxfam’s Women’s Economic
Empowerment and Care (WE-Care) initiative in Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania,
Uganda and Zimbabwe.
Another tragedy, the statement
observes, is that such free labour, “without which our economies would
collapse”, accounts for $10 trillion of global output annually (roughly
equivalent to 13 percent of global GDP) but is never in official GDP
calculations and remains largely absent from government policies.
This
comes at a time Kenya’s Gender Gap Index depicts a decline in the
promotion of equal opportunities for men and women. The country scored
0.67 out of one last year, down from 0.73 in 2014, occasioning a drop of
72 places in the world ranking from 37 to 109 out of 153 countries, the
lowest in a decade. The score, which is seriously steeped against girls
and women, places Kenya at number 20 out of 33 countries in sub-Saharan
Africa.
As African leaders, including President Uhuru Kenyatta,
congregate for the 33rd Ordinary Session of the Assembly of the Heads of
State and Government of the African Union next week (February 9 -10),
Oxfam will be pitching tent in Addis Ababa to lobby them to make women’s
work count.
Among
the millions of African women whose message will be carried to the
summit is Jane Muthoni, a 53-year-old community health volunteer in
Kawangware slum in Nairobi, who despite her dexterity in juggling
between family chores and other responsibilities and interests believes
that women deserve a better deal. “There is this time I felt like my
system was going to shut. When I went to the hospital the doctor told me
I was not sick but had to take a rest or I would collapse and die,” she
tells Nation Newsplex, referring to a near-fatal experience of burnout.
The mother of two boys wakes up at 4.45am to prepare breakfast
and help her husband and their 12-year-old last-born get ready for work
and school, respectively. It is after they have finished and left the
house by 7am that she prepares herself and sets out to meet colleagues
in the field where they help an NGO mobilise people for HIV counselling
and testing.
Jane falls among the seven in 10 community
health workers in sub-Saharan Africa that are women. Most are young,
and a half of them have only primary education. The vast majority are
unpaid, 43 percent receive non-monetary incentives and 23 percent
receive a stipend.
After spending the day
criss-crossing the unforgiving terrain of the sprawling slum, Jane drags
herself back home to attend to another line-up of responsibilities –
what her community considers the essence of her womanhood. She prepares
supper, washes and irons clothes and cleans utensils. Then when she is
supposed to call it a day like the other members of the family, she
stays behind and gets engrossed in her beadwork, which is her main
source of income.
“Sometimes I stay very late into the
night. There is this time I had a large order of 30 pieces of beaded
bags and had to work till 3am for five days,” she says. She markets her
merchandise online and has shipped goods to customers in the US and
Europe.
Women small-scale traders in Nairobi’s slums
spend 49 hours a week making goods for sale, compared with 53 hours
spent by male colleagues, according to Women and Unpaid Care work: Rapid
Care Work Analysis in Nairobi Informal Settlements, a study published
late last year by Oxfam. This suggests that they have less spare time to
fully deploy their skills and talents to earn money. In fact, the
report notes that women put in 65 man-hours into unpaid care in a week,
more than double that spent by male colleagues (29), and have 36 rest
hours, 13 less than their male colleagues’ 49.
Repugnant
cultural beliefs and practices have continued to perpetuate gender
imbalance in the global unpaid care sector, with Africa being the
capital of such inequality. In another survey conducted last year by
Oxfam in Nairobi’s slums, almost a half of the men had never seen a man
cook, three in five had not seen a man clean the house and seven out of
10 had not seen a man wash clothes.
Queer behaviour
When
Jane’s husband of 23 years, Joseph Changawa, recently began to chip
into her bid work and house chores, even some of his closest friends
could not accommodate his ‘queer’ behaviour. “When they visited, they
would not understand why it was me preparing for them tea while my wife
‘played with beads’ all the while,” he says as his wife looks on
adoringly. Soon, he became the laughing stock of the community and even
lost a few friends. However, he is happy that by sharing work the family
now makes more money and is also able to inspire other spouses to join
hands.
Pervasive inequality in unpaid care and domestic
work is also reflected in wage employment, where, in Kenya, women earn
Sh68 for every Sh100 paid to men, according to The Global Gender Report
2017.
Many years of women working more than men but
earning less or nothing, as in the case of unpaid care, turn them into
the global face of poverty. A report released by Oxfam last month ahead
of the World Economic Forum in Davos revealed that the 22 richest men in
the world have more wealth than all the women in Africa.
Even
as a few men like Joseph attempt to lead the male folk into a new
chapter where the burden of unpaid care is shouldered equally between
men and women, investing in care-supporting infrastructure and services
would significantly reduce the burden and spur economic development,
according to Oxfam.
In one of its studies, 43 percent
of households in Kitui County that acquired improved cooking stoves used
the time women would spend collecting firewood on other economically
productive work.
The government should, among other
things, invest national time-use data for policy formulation and factor
in unpaid care and domestic work in budgets and development programmes.
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