Tefera, N. (2020) “Gender-Differentiated Time Allocations on Daily Activities in Rural Ethiopia.”
The paper examines households’ members’ time use for different activities using a unique year-long, 24-hour time allocation survey conducted every fortnight. The study includes 240 households with family members aged 6 and older. The time household members devote to household duties, farm work, on- and off-farm wage employment, community management, social events, and leisure was examined in the four rural Ethiopian villages that were chosen for the study. The most recent nationally representative socio economic household survey of Ethiopia, which was conducted during the harvest and threshing seasons, was used as a triangulation tool by the author.
Tefera broke down the results into six major categories: household chores, farm work, on- and off-farm employment, community management and social events, childcare, and leisure. The findings show that gender-discriminated time use is particularly pronounced in rural areas of Ethiopia. While men manage the majority of farm activities (crop and livestock production), on average, for 6:30–8:00 hours per day, women are almost entirely responsible for performing domestic chores and caring for household animals, which take, on average, 8:00–14:00 hours a day.
Tefera emphasised that women do twice as much work at home, on the farm, and in charge of raising children as well. Male children tend to livestock and small ruminants while attending school, while female children spend a significant portion of their daily time fetching water and gathering firewood. Compared to women, men have more free time. In all villages, women and female children perform household chores; the majority of women spend up to 60% of their daily time on these tasks. As a result, they have less time for leisure activities like sleeping, resting, relaxing, and chatting than men and children do. Although they help with marketing and wood collection, men and male children work on farms for longer than 6:30 hours each workday, preparing the land for cultivation and harvesting.
The lack of basic infrastructure, such as access to electricity, potable water, and roads, as well as the high cost of new cooking technologies on the market, have all been mentioned by the author as adding to the daily burden of women and female children. Rural community electrification could have a significant positive impact on the lives and livelihoods of rural women in the country, and this should be done in conjunction with improved road connectivity, access to credit, insurance, and other essential services. Tefera referred to the Productive Safety Net Programme (PSNP) as a means of assisting in the implementation of the above-mentioned recommendation.