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Global Policy Summary: Childcare Crisis

A year into the pandemic, we are no longer just worrying about progress on women’s equality coming to a standstill. We’re now seeing the possibility of such progress being reversed. Globally, women tend to work in low-paying jobs and in the informal sector—precarious employment that has been upended by lockdowns and COVID-19 restrictions. Adding another layer to this burden, women’s unpaid care work is soaring. The childcare crisis is at a tipping point. Despite being key to human well-being and to the functioning of the economy, care work remains unrecognised, undervalued, and predominantly performed by women and girls the world over. The pandemic has accelerated the demand for care work and exacerbated entrenched gender inequalities. Childcare must be addressed within our COVID-19 recovery plans both to advance gender equality and because it makes fiscal sense.

Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), and IWWAGE at LEAD have collaborated to undertake an evidence review of the current childcare crisis and the road for post-COVID recovery and resilience.  This brief based on the paper released on International Women’s Day, March 8, 2021 outlines the different pathways in which COVID-19 is impacting women’s care burden, with recommendations for policy solutions and measures that could be explored in different contexts by governments, the private sector, and other key development actors, with a focus on low- and middle-income countries (LMICs).

 

Global Executive Summary: Childcare Crisis

A year into the pandemic, we are no longer just worrying about progress on women’s equality coming to a standstill. We’re now seeing the possibility of such progress being reversed. Globally, women tend to work in low-paying jobs and in the informal sector—precarious employment that has been upended by lockdowns and COVID-19 restrictions. Adding another layer to this burden, women’s unpaid care work is soaring. The childcare crisis is at a tipping point. Despite being key to human well-being and to the functioning of the economy, care work remains unrecognised, undervalued, and predominantly performed by women and girls the world over. The pandemic has accelerated the demand for care work and exacerbated entrenched gender inequalities. Childcare must be addressed within our COVID-19 recovery plans both to advance gender equality and because it makes fiscal sense.

Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), and IWWAGE at LEAD have collaborated to undertake an evidence review of the current childcare crisis and the road for post-COVID recovery and resilience.  This brief based on the paper released on International Women’s Day, March 8, 2021 outlines the different pathways in which COVID-19 is impacting women’s care burden, with recommendations for policy solutions and measures that could be explored in different contexts by governments, the private sector, and other key development actors, with a focus on low- and middle-income countries (LMICs).

 

 

 

 

 

Evidence Review of the Global Childcare Crisis and the road for post COVID-19 recovery and resilience

The devastating impact that COVID-19 has had on women’s livelihoods cannot be overstated. Globally, women tend to work in low-paying jobs and in the informal sector—precarious employment that has been upended by lockdowns and COVID-19 restrictions. Adding another layer to this burden, women’s unpaid care work is soaring. Childcare must be addressed within our COVID-19 recovery plans both to advance gender equality and because it makes fiscal sense. In addition to reducing the undue burden of care, affordable and quality childcare frees mothers up to participate in the labour force and creates decent jobs for women in the childcare sector. Currently, gender gaps in labour force participation in OECD countries cost the economy about 15 percent of GDP. Yet, so far, we have not seen the mobilisation of public, private, and foreign aid funding that is urgently needed to tackle this crisis. The inequalities women face are not new. But the pandemic has exacerbated and laid them bare.

Policymakers must seize the opportunity to rectify this crisis, both as part and parcel of an inclusive COVID-19 response and for the benefit of future generations. This paper has recommended a range of policy solutions and measures available to tackle the COVID-19 exacerbated childcare crisis and pave the road for post-COVID-19 recovery and resilience. Together, these recommendations are aimed at promoting a comprehensive childcare agenda and at recognising the provision of quality childcare as a societal responsibility—as opposed to women’s responsibility alone. We acknowledge that there will ultimately be trade-offs that countries will need to make and our goal has been to present a broad range of available evidence, examples, and promising practices to help countries decide how best to allocate their finite resources and chart a path forward.

 

Women’s Workforce Participation In India: Statewise Trends

Bihar has the lowest female workforce participation rate (FWPR) among all states at 2.8 percent. The decline in FWPR has been shaper in rural areas as compared to urban areas, pushing a large number of women out of the workforce since 2007-08. With the decline in women workforce, there has been a substantial increase in the share of women in regular employment, in line with the national trend, and a significant decline in the share of self-employed, which is greater than the decline observed at the all India level. Women’s self-employment in Bihar is characterised by high incidence of own account work and low share of unpaid work, in contrast with all India figures.

Women’s Workforce Participation In India: Statewise Trends

Women’s labourforce participation rates (LFPR) reveals some interesting trends for Maharashtra. As per the figures from the labourforce surveys, the LFPR is significantly higher than the all-India figures, largely driven by higher than average rural employment. The state also shares a decline in self-employment and casual employment and a shift towards regular wage work for both rural and urban women. In Maharashtra the urban areas witnessed a consistent rise in regular wage work of women since 2004-05. More than 60 percent of women are employed as regular workers – 70 percent of which is concentrated in the services sector such as education, health and retail. In rural areas, the share of casual workers is considerably higher at around 42 percent, followed by 52 percent in self-employment. The incidence of unpaid family workers among self-employed women exceed 80 percent. While the urban areas show considerable diversity of women workers across occupations and sectors, women in the rural areas remain concentrated as manual workers in agriculture or within construction work.

Digital Solutions to Unlock the Potential of SHGs and their Federations

Digital tools hold the promise of accelerating women’s empowerment, enhancing the effectiveness and efficacy of existing initiatives, providing new tools to improve knowledge, and creating new opportunities for women to connect and share information.  Most of these initiatives revolve around Self Help Groups (SHGs) and federations, which are social support groups known for empowering women through social mobilisation and financial inclusion. To understand the varied digitization initiatives within the SHG ecosystem in India, IWWAGE undertook a detailed landscape assessment of such initiatives. The study, undertaken in 2018, covered various state chapters of NRLM and SHPAs across states like Andhra Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Haryana, Jharkhand, Maharashtra, and Tamil Nadu, to understand the level of digitisation undertaken in each. This brief discusses the observations and findings from the study for Chhattisgarh, and identifies challenges and potential opportunities to implement digital solutions to support SHGs.

 

Accelerating Women’s Access to Entitlements through Digital Solutions

Digital innovation presents exciting opportunities for women who are part of collectives or Self Help Groups (SHGs). Technology can be used to link women within SHGs to each other and other existing l networks, and layer other services and use cases to promote their social and economic empowerment.  More specifically, SHGs can use digital platforms to request and receive information and services, so as to enable their members access these services. Moreover, innovative digital solutions can address mobility, cost and literacy barriers and significantly increase the penetration of these benefits. Haqdarshak is an innovative mobile application developed by Haqdarshak Empowerment Solutions Private Ltd (HESPL), in collaboration with Save the Children and Nokia.  The app provides a ready reference of more than 200 central and state government welfare schemes and programmes, and the benefits promised, eligibility criteria, documents required, and application process for each. The brief brings a snapshot of the model.

 

IWWAGE- ISST Briefs

The series of research brief presented below identifies the barriers to women’s labourforce participation and highlights each issue in a separate brief based on available evidence. This is a collaborative series between IWWAGE and ISST.  The briefs have been prepared by IWWAGE and ISST team members and reviewed by an internal team comprising of Ratna Sudarshan, Aasha Kapur Mehta, Sona Mitra and Soumya Kapoor Mehta.

Mobility and Safety of Women: Interlinkages with Labour Force Participation

One of the major factors limiting the participation of women in the labour force is concern for their safety. These include fear of sexual violence in streets, in and around public transportation, schools, workplaces and other public and private spaces. This reality decreases women’s and girls’ freedom of mobility by impacting their ability to participate in school, work and public life; access to essential services; and enjoyment of cultural and recreational opportunities. In particular, ensuring a safe city and a safe workplace by investing in safe and affordable modes of public transportation, infrastructural additions to make cities more accessible for women, and inclusive legal provisions for safety at work can be important enablers of female LFPR. This policy brief attempts to describe the issues underpinning women’s safety as a barrier to their participation in the labour force; and shares recommendations to ensure that safety does not act as a barrier to mobility and the ability to access services that might improve life prospects and opportunities for women and girls.

Women’s Entrepreneurship in India: Harnessing the Gender Dividend

India’s economic growth story has eluded a large section of the micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs)—in fact the smallest of the enterprises led by women. This is evident in the fact that, despite the growing number of MSMEs in India, as of 2018–19, only one in every five enterprises was owned by women (21.5 per cent). Not only is women’s representation across sectors low, the growth of existing enterprises also seems to have stagnated over time. This brief seeks to highlight the key challenges to women’s entrepreneurship in India, including social norms and biases, lack of education, unequal opportunities for affordable financing, and limited networking opportunities which prevent them from exploring their full entrepreneurial potential. It also seeks to document some of the key recommendations to address these social, economic and technological constraints.

Financial Inclusion and Female Labour Force Participation

The rapid growth in India over the past decade has been coupled with a steady decline in female labour force participation. Despite rising GDPs, improvements in higher education attainment as well as fall in fertility rates, India’s female labour force participation rate (LFPR) has continued to drop. This has been further aggravated by job stagnation and high unemployment rates in recent years which have impacted women disproportionately and may worsen due to the ongoing pandemic. In India, existing societal norms, low literacy levels as well as lack of access to fixed assets further excludes women from the formal financial structure, thereby hampering their socio-economic growth. The brief analyses the barriers faced by women while accessing financial services and products, the lack of gender- specific policies, discrimination towards women entrepreneurs and geographic distance to financial institutions. Attempt is also made to look at policy interventions, and schemes designed to address some of the supply side barriers.

Barriers for Women in Public Employment

Despite high economic growth and improved health and economic outcomes since the 1990s, female labour force participation (FLFP) has stagnated or declined in India, falling to 17.5 per cent in 2017–18 according to the Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS). For working women, the public sector is the largest provider of formal or regular salaried jobs in the Indian economy. Given stagnating FLFP according to official data, the severe impacts of COVID-19 on unemployment, and the necessity to boost economic growth and recovery, removing barriers to women’s opportunities in public employment is more important than ever. The brief looks at the role of women’s public employment prospects in not only creating needed jobs, but delivering indirect benefits such as improved public service delivery, greater social protection for women, and boosts to consumption from increased household incomes. Addressing them will help guarantee the right to safe working conditions, adequate compensation, and deserved social protections that will benefit women workers and the economy at large.

Women in the Indian Informal Economy

Globally, two billion of population aged 15 years and above works in the informal economy, representing 61.2 per cent of world employment. Informal employment is a greater source of employment for men (63 per cent) than women (58.1 per cent). In India, although the absolute numbers are lower, a slightly higher percentage of women workers are in informal employment as compared to men. In India, women are almost always involved in some kind of productive and/or reproductive activity, but much of their work is invisible, and they are largely employed in low skilled, low paid informal work with little or no social security, with a consolidation of caste or religion-based disadvantages, even within a larger context of women’s marginalisation. Within this informal workforce with its persistent gender-based occupational segregation, the COVID-19 pandemic is intensifying pre-existing inequalities, exposing vulnerabilities across every sphere, from health to the economy, security to social protection. The brief analyses gender dimension of informality, its implications and captures the gendered experiences of informal workers during the lockdown and the post-lockdown period.

Women and Unpaid Work

Women’s workforce participation rates (WPR) in India, as measured by the National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO), have been low and consistently declining over the last 15 years or so. An important part of the reason for this is women’s unpaid and unaccounted work. Time is spent on activities which remain excluded from the radar of large sample surveys on employment. Feminist scholars have been arguing for recognition, reduction and redistribution of unpaid activities to be able to move towards gender equality. With the transformation of the household into the site of work and livelihood due to the COVID- 19 pandemic, power relations are seen manifesting both within and outside the household, forcing women to spend hours in backbreaking work, often not even recognised as work in surveys or discourses. The brief assesses the impact of the pandemic and the consequent lockdown on women workers in informal sectors and shares recommendations to recognise and redistribute unpaid work.

Opportunities for Transformative Financing for Women and Girls

This paper draws on a pre-budget consultation hosted by IWWAGE and The Quantum Hub (TQH) on 1 October 2020, ‘Transformative financing for Gender Equality in a COVID-19 context’ to inform the Union Budget 2021-22. The aim of the consultation was to identify and amplify the needs of millions of women and girls whose lives have been disrupted and severely affected because of the pandemic, but also account for the disadvantages and inequities that existed even before COVID-19. IWWAGE invited experts1 from academia, civil society, NGOs, and donor bodies, who have been actively advocating for transformative financing for gender equality in India. These experts shared their insights from current and past experiences to shape an actionable agenda to improve the lives of women and girls in the current context. IWWAGE, like some of the experts invited for the consultation, is part of the Broad-Based Committee on Gender Budgeting and Analysis that has been set up by the Ministry for Women and Child Development (MWCD). We used this opportunity to provide suggestions to support the gender responsive budgeting efforts of MWCD and that of other relevant ministries, and also shared these with the Ministry of Finance in response to their request for ideas for Union Budget 2021-22. We also aim to share insights from this consultation among key decision makers, relevant line ministries and departments, and to a wider audience engaged in shaping the agenda on advancing gender equality and women’s economic empowerment in India. This paper has been jointly developed by The Quantum Hub (TQH) and IWWAGE.