Paid work, unpaid care work and women's empowerment in Nepal

ABSTRACT

Employment and work surveys in Nepal have shown a high concentration of women in certain occupations, being flexible, low paid and requiring low skill. In the far-western region (Jumla District, Karnali Zone), the Government of Nepal provides employment to women and men through a public works programme, the Karnali Employment Programme (KEP). This paper assesses the empowerment potential of the KEP and similar employment programmes, and questions whether paid work leads to economic empowerment for women. It provides a glimpse into work patterns in low-income families in Nepal, and juxtaposes the goal of women's economic empowerment through entry into the labour market with their lived realities and needs. The paper uses ILO's Decent Work framework to argue that two key aspects are critical for women's empowerment through paid work: firstly, quality; and secondly, a positive balance between paid work, unpaid work and care work.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Anweshaa Ghosh is a feminist researcher and presently works as a Research Analyst at the Institute of Social Studies Trust, New Delhi. She has over nine years of experience in the field of gender and research and her key interests lie in women’s informal labour, unpaid care work, movement building and feminist evaluations. She has worked extensively on various gender and labour qualitative research topics in India and Nepal.

Deepta Chopra is a feminist social scientist, leading IDS’s work on women’s empowerment and unpaid care. Her research interests focus on gendered political economy analysis of policies for the empowerment of women and girls, and its core links with unpaid care work. She has developed and implemented several research projects on social protection and economic empowerment of women and girls, with a focus on South Asia. Deepta has extensive experience on the politics of policy processes, including work on the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA). Deepta is an expert on qualitative research design and methodologies.

Notes

1 The GrOW research study on Balncing Women's Paid and Unpaid Care Work, was a 27 month (2015–2017) project conducted across four countries – India, Nepal, Tanzania and Rwanda.

2 For the KEP participants, the research team consulted with the KEPTA office in Kathmandu, and based on time, resources and accessibility, selected Chandannath Municipality and Depalgaon VDC in Jumla district in the Karnali Zone of northwestern Nepal for fieldwork. The social mobilisers at VDC level were asked to draw up a list of women respondents (bothparticipant and non-participant) who met the sample criteria, from which women were selected randomly for the survey.

3 For households case studies, out of the 8 selected women respondents in each site, 5 were KEP participants and 3 were non-participants.

4 See Ghosh et al. (2017) for further details of the methodology, including selection criteria for respondents and respondent profiles.

5 High care dependency is defined as having more than 3 children, 6 years and below.

6 Nepal: Female labour force participation rate accessed from https://www.theglobaleconomy.com/Nepal/Female_labor_force_participation/.

7 Progress of Women in Nepal Report, 1995–2015 by SrabhiPudasaini (2015), quoted in http://kathmandupost.ekantipur.com/news/2015-12-18/women-power-20151218084038.html

8 Categorised as self-employment in Population Monograph Volume 2 – Social Demography (GoN 2014c).

9 See Khatiwada and Koehler (2014) for an in-depth discussion of how KEP is situated in the broader context of Nepal's social policy reforms in the wake of a 10-year civil war and social policy innovations thereafter.

10 https://www.ilo.org/public/english/standards/relm/ilc/ilc87/rep-i.htm.

11 In 1999, ILO stated the key reasons of Decent Work deficits caused by a gap between the world that we work in and the hopes that people have for a better life.

12 These CEPs (in 2014) created in Jumla and Kalikot, operated under special arrangements, as the Karnali Regional Development Unit (KRDU) set aside special funding for the payment of workers and other inputs.

13 Based on a Process Monitoring conducted by MEL (RAP 3) in February 2015 that examined the Karnali Employment Programme Technical Assistance (KEPTA) project in Kalikot and Jumla.

14 Although KEP's implementation guidelines (GoN 2014a) specifically mention that the worksite should be within one-hour walking distance from the village, most of the women respondents at the two sites shared that it takes them two to three hours to reach the worksite.

15 See Koehler (2017) for a fuller discussion of rights-based social policy and its transformative potential in South Asia (including Nepal).