Taking action: achieving gender equality and empowering women

Chapter 5
Invest in infrastructure to reduce
women’s and girls’ time burdens
Women’s and girls’ ability to empower themselves economically and politically
by going to school and engaging in productive and civic activities is often
limited by their responsibility for everyday maintenance tasks in the household
division of labor. For poor women and girls this burden is even greater because
of the underinvestment in public infrastructure in most low-income countries.
The time women and girls spend on routine tasks can be reduced dramatically
if the appropriate infrastructure is in place: efficient sources of energy (especially
new forms of fuel for cooking and heating), transport systems, and water
and sanitation systems. Investments in such infrastructure to relieve women’s
time burdens are essential to maximize the impact of the strategic priorities
discussed in this report and to reduce poverty.
Why reducing women’s and girls’ time burdens is a strategic priority
Providing infrastructure in both rural and urban areas benefits poor men and
women. But lack of adequate physical facilities (such as roads, utility supply
systems, communication systems, water and waste disposal systems) and the
underprovision of services flowing from those facilities typically results in a far
greater time burden on women than on men because of a gender-based household
division of labor. As Modi (2004, p.16) says, “It would be hard to imagine
in the developed world today a family spending one or more hours every day
gathering biomass such as wood, agricultural residues, and dung when one
could instead buy cooking fuel for the same purpose at a price that reflects a
mere two or five minutes of income from work. Yet this is the burden of women
in the developing world.”
Three types of infrastructure are particularly important: energy, transport,
and water and sanitation. This section reviews the limited evidence on genderdifferentiated
access to and use of such infrastructure.