Unpaid care work plays an important role in households and communities in Ghana. This project aims to generate evidence to make sure that early childhood development interventions don’t worsen outcomes for caregivers – particularly women.
Unpaid care work is a critical – yet largely unseen – dimension of human well-being that provides essential domestic services within households, for other households and to community members.
Evidence is needed to ensure that early child development interventions, including those implemented by the Government of Ghana which focus on parental engagement, do not worsen outcomes of caregivers, for example by placing additional burden on them.
The concept is particularly relevant for women who continue to provide most of the childcare around the world, including in Ghana, at home and in day care settings. Female-focused policies might inadvertently perpetuate inequalities by reinforcing restrictive gender norms.
Despite a fast-growing literature evaluating early child development interventions, only a small minority of studies have reported on impacts on mother-specific outcomes beyond those focusing on parenting, such as time use (Evans et al, 2021). At the same time, there is a need for evidence on impacts of current programmes on fathers, which only 3% of studies report any outcomes on (Evans et al, 2021).
This project will:
- leverage the ongoing impact evaluation of the scaled intervention by the Government Education Service and NGO Lively Minds, and document time allocations of primary care-givers (in more than 90% of cases the biological mother) without the programme in place;
- estimate intervention impacts on these variables by exploiting the experimental variation induced by the randomised control trial (RCT) design of the evaluation;
- field the same survey instruments to primary care-givers’ spouses; and
- use information on wages to assess the monetary implication of any observed changes.
We will align our analysis as much as possible with the ‘Unpaid Care Toolkit’ led by the charity Action Aid and developed with support from Ghana’s National Development Planning Commission in 2020.