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Addressing Women’s Unpaid Care Work can Final Project team member
lead to a reduction in Violence against Women. names, Module, name, credits,
etc. here.
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Tubibe Amahoro and Actionaid Rwanda in place.

address the issue of Women’s UCW

Tubibe Amahoro and ActionAid recognise that

ucw is essential to human development and
Recognise, Reduce, Redistribute
sustaining households and communities.
Women’s Unpaid Care Works
However, it has also been established that
unpaid care work greatly contributes to gender
inequalities, violations of women’s rights and
women’s poverty.

Women's UCW is more highly valued within

households and communities and distributed
within some households and hours spent by
women on UCW is reduced, resulting in more
free time for women to engage in social,
economic and political activities.
TUBIBE AMAHORO in partnership with
In Murundi and Gitesi communities, women have Actionaid Rwanda will continue to
Women are still disadvantaged by the amount of
been supported with water harvesting tanks and support women famers to reduce the
Unpaid Care Work they do. Rural women spend
other women have joined SACCOs and took time they spend in water collection by
most of their time on unpaid care work compared to
loans for installing biogas and water taps in their supporting them to have access to
men. According to the findings women spend an
homes for reducing the time they would spend clean water in their homes.
average of seven hours daily on unpaid care work
in collecting water. Further, some women have
while men spend an average of only an hour. This
been supported to install solar energy in their
Project funded by: kind of work needs to be valued and recognized
homes while the project has supported Gitesi
because it actually contributes a lot to the
community with Early Childhood Development
households
Centers.
Women’s Unpaid Care Works: The
Overlooked Barrier to Female
Labor Force Participation
Women do three times more of the
world’s unpaid work than men.
Economic policies that reduce
redistribute unpaid work could increase
women’s labor force participation,
promote sustained economic growth,
and advance gender equality.
However, unpaid care work has been
largely ignored by policy agendas around
the world because of the difficulty in
measuring the burden and benefits of
unpaid care, in addition to its only recently
recognized status as an issue
studying. Fortunately, new studies are
emerging to add to the data and highlight
the need for new and revised policies.
In other words, when women have to spend
less time on activities such as cooking,
collecting firewood, and cleaning, their labor
force participation increases. Seen this way,
it is evident that unpaid care work is a
deterrent to women’s economic
advancement. A recent ActionAid study
shows that women do 2.6 times the UCW
than men do.
The "TIME IS NOW" to redistribute and often restrict them to low-skilled,
this work through shared irregular or informal employment.
responsibility and equal roles.
and
Unpaid care work is a social good. It
becomes problematic when it is:
worth 1. Invisible, and therefore Cultural attitudes that assign unpaid care
undervalued or ignored work exclusively to women will need to
2. characterized by extremely heavy change as well for the view that unpaid care
care tasks, most notably in poor work is women’s work to evolve. But the first
communities without adequate steps to cultural transformation are
recognizing and redistributing unpaid care
access to services; and,
work, and removing the structural barriers to
3. Unequal, meaning that the biggest
women’s labor force participation. Unpaid
responsibility falls on women and
Care Work performed by women is
girls in poor communities.
linked to violence against them.
Heavy and unequal care responsibilities
Women’s Unpaid Care Work is one of
contribute to time poverty, limited mobility
roots cause of poverty and violation of
and poor health and well-being. They
women’s rights.
undermine the rights of women, limit their
opportunities, capabilities and choices