Scaling up innovations for reducing and redistributing women’s and girls’ unpaid care work in rural Tanzania

 

Women in rural areas of Tanzania dedicate a significant portion of their time to unpaid care work and managing household demands - including walking long distances of up to 30 kilometres to fetch water, with five 20-litre buckets on their heads each day. This project will address barriers to women’s and girls’ economic empowerment in the Kishapu District by reducing time spent fetching water through a communal rainwater harvesting technology tested and proven to be useful in Kishapu. This will be coupled with an intervention to redistribute women’s unpaid care work, the Bandebereho cultural norms change model, which was originally piloted in Rwanda and will be adapted to the Kishapu context.

The aim of the project is to increase the number of women benefiting from a tested rainwater harvesting innovation in the Kishapu district, as well as the availability of water per person, and the duration of water availability during the dry season. In order to provide income-generating opportunities for women and girls, the project will also provide entrepreneurship, business management and formal job acquisition training. Further, it will address the cultural norms that assign the burden of unpaid care work to women and girls and thereby exclude them from labour market opportunities.

This project is supported under the Scaling Care Innovations in Africa partnership co-funded by Global Affairs Canada and IDRC. Scaling Care Innovations is a five-year partnership aimed at scaling tested and locally grounded policy and program innovations to redress gender inequalities in unpaid care work in Sub-Saharan Africa.