Haris Gazdar speaks about a new LANSA Working Paper that explores the trade-offs between work and care on the nutrition outcomes for children in Pakistan

1. Women‟s Agricultural Work
and Nutrition in Pakistan:
Findings from Qualitative
Research
Balagamwala, Gazdar and Mallah (2015)
Collective for Social Science Research
Researchcollective.org

2. Under-5 Nutrition Indicators in
Pakistan –
National Nutrition Survey
NNS 2001 NNS 2011
Stunting 42% 44%
Wasting 14% 15%
Underweight 32% 32%

3. Labour force statistics by sex –
Labour Force Survey
Year Labour Force Participation
Rate %
Labour Force Employed in
Agriculture %
Male Female Male Female
2001-
02
83 16 37 65
2012-
13
81 24 33 75

4. Pathways framework –
Gillespie, Harris and Kadiyala (2012)
• From agriculture (growth) to nutrition
• Pathways 1-4
• Own food; private income; food prices; non-food
consumption
• Pathways 5-7
• Women‟s income; labour versus care time; women‟s
own consumption and health
• Feminization of agriculture

5. Care
• “Care is the provision in the household and the
community of time, attention and support to meet
physical, mental and social needs of the growing child
and other household members” (ICN 1992, cited in
Engle et al 1999)
• Pregnancy
• Breastfeeding and complementary feeding
• Food preparation
• Hygiene
• Health-seeking
• Psychosocial
• Not just time – time AND resources

6. Existing evidence
• Mixed evidence from
statistical analyses
• Mother‟s care to nutrition
status
• Women‟s income and care
expenditure
• Labour demand and care
time
• Pakistan Demographic and
Health Survey 2012-13
Mother’s
occupation
Stunted % Wasted %
All 44 11
Not working 42 11
Agricultural
work
52 13
Non-
agricultural
work
48 8

7. Beyond pathways - resources,
choices & behaviour
• Jointly determined outcomes of decision-making at the
household level
• Household well-being defined in terms of nutrition (health)
outcomes (of children)
• Income and care time jointly determined – extension of
standard labour supply model
• Consumption side: care needs time AND resources
• Relax various assumptions
• Household versus individual members objectives – do women
care, do they care more?
• Knowledge, norms and agency: constrain choices
• Exogenous factors: growth, technology, interventions, services

8. Questions & empirical
approach
• Preliminary qualitative fieldwork objectives
• Explore Pathways 5-7 and implications of above model (joint
determination)
• How men and women understand choices and trade-offs with
respect to income and care
• Gendered norms in work and care – implications
• Labour arrangements, technologies, interventions, and their
implications, particularly in seeing change

9. Site selection for qualitative
fieldwork
• Mainstream canal-irrigated areas
with two-crop annual cycle
• Cotton-wheat, rice-wheat,
sugarcane, fodder
• Shahdadpur and Badin in Sindh,
further work in Punjab
• Unequal land ownership –
landlessness, some large land
holdings
• Self-cultivation, share-cropping, farm
labour, non-farm employment
• Social structures dominated by
kinship group-based communities
and hierarchies; religious minority
• Prevalence of various „fragility‟
related issues
• Different levels of physical and
social infrastructure
• Road access, health facilities,
LHWs, cash transfer programme
• Technological change,
intervention and shock
• New seed varieties, land grants
programme, flood

10. Gendered work & economic
agency
• Work
• Men‟s work: land preparation,
water management,
fertilizer/pesticide application
• Women‟s work: cotton
harvesting, vegetable picking,
fodder (mostly women)
• Mixed work: other harvesting,
transplanting, weeding
• Economic agency
• Remuneration: grain, cash,
household or individual
• Resources: land - men,
livestock-can be individual
• Market access: mostly men,
women‟s limited autonomous
interaction with markets
• Importance of
acknowledgement

11. Cotton harvesting
• Seen exclusively as women‟s
work
• „Rivayat‟, „aib‟, exceptions
underline rule
• Differences between regions in
strength of norm
• July to November
• 4-6 rounds of picking, 8-12 day
interval, 8am to 5pm
• Shahdadpur: cotton region
• Widespread: various labour
arrangements, including
„jamadar‟ contractor
• Choice: work or not, if work then
full day, all season, little choice
for sharecropper families
• Badin: mixed region with some
cotton
• Less demand for labour, more
flexible arrangements
• Income
• Upto 25,000 rupees in a season
• Different levels of agency
• Choice and agency
• Correlated with class, caste
• Constraint („majboori‟), earning
opportunity, and something extra
(„shauq‟)
• Lifeline, extra consumption,
savings

12. Care
• Economic and ecological factors
• Women‟s health: exposure
• Pregnant women
• High fertility rates, indications of decline, mixed
• Availability and utilisation of antenatal services
• Work during pregnancy and after birth
• Special treatment triggers
• Breastfeeding and complementary feeding
• General behaviour, norms, resources
• Working women‟s constraints: distance, exhaustion,
temperature
• Proactive versus reactive care
• Differences across sites, and changes over time

13. Implications for nutrition
• Evidence of trade-off between
income and care
• Whose trade-off?
Acknowledgement of women‟s
economic contribution
• Time allocation main factor
• Key issue: gendered division of
work AND care, limited evidence
of change in response to
household economic
constraints/opportunity
• Terms of the trade-off vary
• Land ownership, tenure, region,
prior understanding of care-
nutrition relationship
• Importance of norms, changes in
these or at least in knowledge of
norms
• Fertility, work during pregnancy
and after birth, breastfeeding
• Differences between
communities with/without
exposure to health services
• Implications for intermediate
inputs
• Not clear how final nutritional
outcomes impacted – likely to be
dominated by other economic
and ecological factors – but
useful to focus on intermediate
inputs

14. Conclusions and way forward
• Qualitative fieldwork
supports, embellishes
outlined model
• Severity of trade-off between
work and care time
allocations depends on
norms, socioeconomic status,
nature of labour demand
• Women‟s work in agriculture
can be empowering and pro-
nutrition through
acknowledgement
• Norms around care change
through health interventions,
but also interaction among
women
• Key question: how can
women‟s choices in the
income-care trade-off with
respect to agricultural work
be made more pro-
nutrition?
• Implications of agricultural
growth
• Intersectoral strategies
• Social protection systems
• Health-nutrition programmes
• Asset transfer programmes
• Focus on intermediate inputs as
well as nutrition outcomes