Patterns of time use in Tanzania: how to make public investment in ...

3. How women and men in Tanzania spend their time: an overview
This section presents data on all the activities identified in the survey broken
down by sex. Table 3.1 describes the average time spent per day by the entire
female and male Tanzanian populations (aged 5 years and above) in the ten
main activities, with the average calculated over the whole population,
whether or not engaged in that activity.
Table 3.1: Average time spent on activities in a day, by sex and main
activity type
Broad activity type Mean minutes per day % of day
4
All Female Male All Female Male
1 Employment for establishments 61.0 34.7 89.7 4.2 2.4 6.2
2 Primary production activities not for establishments 171.3 163.0 180.2 11.9 11.3 12.5
3 Services for income and other production of goods not for establishments 6.3 6.9 5.7 0.4 0.5 0.4
4 Household maintenance, management and shopping for own household 113.3 169.9 51.8 7.9 11.8 3.6
5 Care for children, the sick, elderly and disabled for own household 23.9 35.4 11.5 1.7 2.5 0.8
6 Community services and help to other households 8.0 7.2 8.9 0.6 0.5 0.6
7 Learning 80.8 75.1 86.9 5.6 5.2 6.0
8 Social and cultural activities 111.4 94.6 129.7 7.7 6.6 9.0
9 Mass media use 12.5 7.7 17.8 0.9 0.5 1.2
10 Personal care and self maintenance 851.5 845.7 857.8 59.1 58.7 59.6
Total 1440.0 1440.0 1440.0 100.0 100.0 100.0
Source: Calculations from the 2006 Tanzania TUS
Table 3.1 shows that patterns of time use between paid and unpaid work are
highly gendered, confirming trends observed in many other countries. On
average, women devote much more time to unpaid activities than men do (for
instance, female time in both household maintenance and care is three times
as much as male time). Women and men spend a similar share of their day on
primary agricultural work (about three hours per day) but men spend more
time in other forms of paid work then women do. Men allocate more time to
non-work activities such as social and cultural engagements and learning.
Figure 3.1 illustrates shares of male and female time inputs into both SNA
and non-SNA production 3 . Women in Tanzania contribute a larger share of
total work time than men in a year (about 57 per cent). The share of their
contribution to non-SNA work time is especially significant (more than 76
percent of their total work time inputs).
3 This is still for the whole population, aged 5 years or older.