# I.   The policy case for improved data on rural women’s employment

Across developing countries, rural women are heavily engaged in a range of employment activities — including smallholder farming, contributing work in the family farm or business, as well as in off-farm jobs that are typically seasonal and informal (ILO, 2018a, 2018b). Employment surveys typically have difficulties in collecting data on these types of jobs, as well as on social and economic barriers that women face in achieving better-quality employment outcomes. These include time burdens in unpaid household and care work, transport and safety issues, and other local norms and institutional barriers around marriage, work and having children (Jayachandran, 2015). Rural women often find themselves in particularly vulnerable employment situations, given limited access to resources, infrastructure and markets, as well as diversified sources of income.

A better understanding of rural women’s work, paid and unpaid,<sup>1</sup> and the constraints they face is critical for policy design as rural economies evolve with economic growth. Depending on country context, growth (particularly in the nonfarm sector) has led to rapid out-migration to urban areas, as well as increased diversification of rural incomes, although the quality and expected earnings of off-farm opportunities are often low (Davis et al 2017, Mellor, 2017). A growing urban middle class in many developing countries has led to increased demand for food and other resources, renewing policy efforts to improve incomes and productivity in agriculture, including investments in inputs and new technology. At the same time, however, rural land ownings are increasingly fragmented across countries, leading to a rising global base of less-productive, smallholder farmers, as well as growing casual labor on farms among the landless (Lowder et al, 2017). Since rural women are often concentrated in these activities, they are increasingly targeted by country programs aiming to raise rural productivity and economic growth (Kochhar et al, 2017). But these programs need to be informed by data that more accurately count women who are employed, and constraints to working. These concerns have also helped motivate recent global initiatives in policy and statistics to regularly track outcomes of small-scale rural work across developing countries, and understand what policies and programs work for raising rural incomes and welfare.

## International momentum on measuring paid and unpaid work for rural women

At the international level, <u>Target 2.3 of the Sustainable Development Goals and the recently-launched 50 x 2030 Initiative</u> emphasize the role of data in policies to raise productivity and earnings among smallholder farmers.<sup>2</sup> Resolution I of the 19<sup>th</sup> <u>Conference of International Statisticians (19</u><sup>th</sup> <u>ICLS, 2013)</u> also narrowed the international definition of employment to work for pay or profit, requiring more careful data collection on (a) economic activities that rural women are concentrated in, including those that are heavily subsistence-based and/or unpaid for significant parts of the year, as well as contributing family work; (b) complementary data collection on individuals’ total work burdens across paid and unpaid activities; as well as (c) additional data on labor underutilization, to provide a comprehensive view of demands and constraints among individuals who either want to engage in more paid work, or are out of the labor force for various reasons. The Women’s Work and Employment Partnership, a multi-institutional collaboration

> 1 In this paper, paid work entails time spent on an income earning activity (even if explicit wages or salary are not given to the person); this also includes work in non-subsistence farming, nonfarm household enterprises, and as an employee.

> 2 Specifically, SDG Target 2.3 looks at doubling agricultural productivity and incomes of small-scale farmers, with a particular focus on women and poorer/marginalized groups.  The 50 x 2030 initiative is a global partnership to conduct regular surveys of small-scale farmers across 50 countries, and make these data available to countries for policy making.

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