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

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Acknowledgements We acknowledge with thanks the staff of the Tanzania National Bureau of Statistics who very kindly shared with us their data, and promptly responded to our queries. We are most grateful to Siwa Msangi, for having involved us in the project, and for his support and great patience at every stage of the work. Many thanks also to Debbie Budlender, for her precious advice on the data, and for inspiration. Wezi Mwangulube provided valuable help with the formatting of the paper. vi
1. Introduction This paper examines gender patterns of time use in Tanzania with a view to identify areas that are most in need for infrastructure investment. The data show that the burden of unpaid work in Tanzania is large, and mostly borne by women. We argue that public investment policy has an important role to play in redressing gender inequalities and reducing poverty by promoting initiatives that reduce time spent on water collection, home maintenance and other unpaid activities. The role of these activities in maintaining households’ standards of living, and in supporting the functioning of the market economy, is not sufficiently recognised. Examples of relevant public policy interventions are infrastructure in the water sector, sanitation services, electrification, roads and better transports-especially in the rural areas. Some descriptive statistics are presented as a first step in analysing activities for which the burden of work is most unequally distributed between different groups of women and men. Investment should especially focus on infrastructure that contributes to reducing the time intensity of such activities, thus having a positive impact both on equality and on labour productivity. These interventions should be given priority in poverty reduction strategies. The analysis draws on the nationally representative 2006 Time Use Survey (TUS) for Tanzania, which is the first of its kind. The Tanzania TUS is very comprehensive and contains rich information that should be taken into account in policy formulation. This initial data exploration was undertaken also with the objective of taking steps towards integrating time use data into an economy-wide macro-model of Tanzania. Such modelling approach could be an effective way to examine and quantify the many linkages between unpaid work and the market economy, and to highlight the important role of gender relations in structuring such interconnections. Lack of time prevented us to take the task forward but we do plan to develop a full modelling project in future research. A few first attempts at including unpaid work into Social Accounting Matrix (SAM)-based modelling do exist (for example Fontana and Wood, 2000 and Fontana, 2001 for Bangladesh; Fontana, 2002 for Zambia; Siddiqui, 2005 for Pakistan; and Fofana at al. 2005 for South Africa) but their approach has limitations since it involves lumping all unpaid household activities together into one homogenous sector— variously called ‘social reproduction’ or ‘household production’. Household tasks differ in terms of their production technologies and the objectives they fulfil (compare, for instance, the activity of washing dishes and cleaning the house, with the task of taking care of a terminally ill family member). 1
Page 1 and 2: Gendered Patterns of Time Use in Ta
Page 3 and 4: Tables Table 3.1 Average time spent
Page 5: population by sex for adults 27 Tab
Page 9 and 10: 2. Data The TUS was undertaken by t
Page 11 and 12: Figure 3.1: Female and male shares
Page 13 and 14: Women spend three times as much as
Page 15 and 16: only 4.5 percent of all households
Page 17 and 18: Table 4.1.5: Participation rate, me
Page 19 and 20: Who are the ‘overburdened’? The
Page 21 and 22: Men and women working in ‘subsist
Page 23 and 24: in the urban areas. This is a more
Page 27 and 28: Figure 4.2.1: Distribution of femal
Page 29 and 30: Does the income level matter? As il
Page 31 and 32: Differences in participation patter
Page 33 and 34: 5.2. Other household maintenance Wo
Page 37 and 38: 6. Patterns of travel We also exami
Page 39 and 40: There appears not to be a strong co
Page 41 and 42: Figure 6.3 and Figure 6.4 show diff
Page 43 and 44: We then took the exercise a little
Page 45 and 46: References Arvidson, A., and M. Nor
Page 47 and 48: ANNEXES Annex 1 - Full list of acti
Page 49 and 50: 420 Cleaning house and surroundings
Page 51 and 52: celebrations 820 Participating in r
Page 53 and 54: Annex 2 Table A1 - Aggregations and
Page 55 and 56: Annex 4 - Methodology Data descript
Page 57 and 58:
p Average minutes per day of partic
Page 59:
o Men rural poor o Men rural non po
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