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

Who are the ‘overburdened’?
The tables presented in the previous sections helped to identify factors that
may affect the distribution of the burden of collecting water between men and
women. We saw, for example, that location as well as income level matters.
So far we presented only averages - either for the overall population or for the
groups actually carrying out the activity, but it is important to also take note
of the dispersion around the average. Figure 4.1.1 shows that the male
distribution for water collection is more skewed than the female distribution
as there is a much larger share of men who do not collect water at all relative
to women, and a much smaller share of men who spend above average time
collecting it. Some of the people who are involved in the collection of water
spend on it much longer than the average 27 minutes. About 7 percent of the
total female adult population spend more than 60 minutes while the
corresponding share for men is only about 2 percent. Most of the people
spending above two hours per day (more than 120 minutes) collecting water
are women.
Figure 4.1.1: Distribution of female and male population collecting water
by duration
Source: Calculations from the 2006 Tanzania TUS
We wanted to understand better what the socio-economic characteristics of
those people who are especially burdened by the task of water collection are.
It is especially them whom projects to improve water access should aim at
benefitting. In order to carry out our analysis further, we arbitrarily set the
‘average duration among participants’ as some sort of ‘time poverty line’ and
defined those above such time poverty line as ‘the overburdened’. ‘Being
overburdened’ is defined here with respect to one particular activity only-- in
this case water collection. We did not take into account people’s overall time
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