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

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The unpaid time inputs necessary to achieve a basic minimum level of wellbeing for all family members in a household (some time called in the literature ‘household overhead time’, Harvey and Taylor, 2000) vary a great deal across household types, depending on the availability of: public services and infrastructure, intermediate market inputs, income, and other assets. All these elements can be seen as important constitutive components of a ‘wellbeing production function’. Differences in overhead time requirements are a significant source of inequality across households and need to be adequately reflected in economy-wide modelling, to help with the appropriate assessment of alternative investment strategies for gender equality. The paper is organised as follows. The first section provides an introduction to the data by offering an overview of how females and males in Tanzania spend their time, including their engagement in paid employment, unpaid work, care for others, their volunteering in communities, socialising, personal care and sleep. The sections that follow each focus on one specific aspect of work, which is singled out for its gender relevance. We analyse in particular water collection, fuel collection and food preparation - the activities in which gender differences in time patterns appear most marked, and which could mostly benefit from improvements in physical infrastructure. A brief analysis of gender patterns in travel is also provided. 1 We describe how the time burden associated with water collection, fetching of fuel, and food preparation vary by sex, location, income, age and other characteristics. We develop the analysis further by focusing on the socio-economic characteristics of those people who must spend above average time on each of such tasks, and whom we call the ‘overburdened’. The last section provides some preliminary quantification of the time that could be saved in a year if interventions to reduce specific aspects of unpaid work were implemented. Most of the analysis refer to the adult population defined as persons of 15 years of age or older (conforming to the standard definition of the labour force as commonly found in most statistics) but selected information on children’s time (age between 5 and 14 years), further disaggregated by sex, is also provided. 1 We decided not to consider unpaid care for persons as this dimension has been thoroughly analysed in an excellent recent study (Budlender, 2008), and would require a more complex range of policy interventions than simply investment in physical infrastructure. 2
2. Data The TUS was undertaken by the Tanzania’s National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) in 2006 as an add-on module of the Integrated Labour Force Survey (ILFS) and is the outcome of several years of advocacy and research led by the Tanzania Gender Networking Programme (TGNP). The survey provides a wealth of information on the range of paid and unpaid activities and tasks that women and men undertake during a day. The broad categories making up SNA work are: (1) employment for establishments, which more or less correspond to formal sector work (2) primary production activities not for establishments, which includes subsistence production as well as collection of fuel and water (3) services for income and other production of goods not for establishments, which more or less corresponds to non-agricultural informal sector work. The categories making up unpaid work (some time called also non-SNA or extended-SNA work) are: (4) household maintenance (including food preparation), management and shopping for own household, (5) care for children, the sick, elderly and disabled for own household and (6) community services and help to other households. Non-work activities include: learning, social and cultural activities, mass-media use, personal care and sleep. The full list of activity codes is reported in Annex 1. Methodological issues are dealt with in Annex 4. The Tanzania TUS is a very useful and innovative dataset—the undertaking of more such surveys should be definitely encouraged. This survey allows us to measure work by women which goes usually undercounted in all other surveys. The design of the TUS, as an add-on module of the ILFS 2 usefully provides the opportunity to draw links between gendered patterns of time use and other socio-economic characteristics contained in other parts of the labour survey. 2 This is not typical of any TUS—time use surveys have been undertaken as stand-alone surveys in some cases and are not always drawing on nationally representative samples. 3
Page 1 and 2: Gendered Patterns of Time Use in Ta
Page 3 and 4: Tables Table 3.1 Average time spent
Page 5 and 6: population by sex for adults 27 Tab
Page 7: 1. Introduction This paper examines
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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