In rural parts of the country, men spend 56 minutes on housework and it takes 4.5 hours for women for cooking and cleaning and many more hours to care for children and elderly, the report points out.[break]
The report ´making care visible´ launched by Dr Meena Acharya in the capital on Monday was based on a study done by Action Aid over an 18-month period in 10 rural and urban communities in Nepal, Nigeria, Kenya and Uganda to track women´s unpaid work ´that largely deprived them of their choices and rights´.
Speaking at the function Acharya said that gender inequality cannot be addressed without considering women´s unpaid care giving work as it directly impacts their right to education, decent work and leisure.
"It was difficult to raise the issue of unpaid care giving work in the past as it would not be taken that positively. Now it is getting attention as a global issue and to address it, the governments need to act on both the policy and community levels," she said adding that the governments rely on women´s labor to fill the gap in public services but this actually comes at the cost of women´s equality and rights.
"Women take the burden of unpaid work thus letting the male members of the family go for paid work. For women´s empowerment, the burden must be recognized by the government and polices introduced for her empowerment," Acharya added.
According to the report, in lack of basic amenities and public services poor women in all the four countries had even harder life. They also lacked the income needed to purchase goods and services to undertake care for their children and elderly people. The report further revealed that household engagement of women in Nepal was actually slightly higher than the women in other three countries and similarly, their contribution to agriculture was also higher.
Meanwhile, Mona Sherpa of Action Aid, who was one of the five members to design and lead the survey, said that care is not only a women´s rights issue as the quality of care provided in any society affects us all either because we require care or are the ones providing the care.
"Care is fundamental to sustaining any society. But still it is perceived to be less valuable than paid work and is never reflected in national statistics or economic analyses," she said. "For too long caregiving has been ignored by national and international policy makers despite research by feminist economists showing the constraints that it places specifically on women´s choices."
The report further shows that women in Kenya spend 48 minutes a day caring for the ill and elderly, while men spend 16 minutes for this. Similarly, in Uganda, women spend less than 2 hours a day while men spend over 7 hours working as paid labourers or running their own small businesses.
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