"The ability of the poor to participate in labour markets
is subject to a number of constraints."

THEME: Several constraints restrict the ability of the rural poor to participate in labour markets; in the case of women, these tend to be exaggerated.

The IFAD Rural Poverty Report 2001 notes that access to labour markets is important for the rural as well as urban poor. Wage labour is sought not only by those who are landless. Farm households with smallholdings frequently find that they can no longer feed their family or pay for health, education and needed consumer goods without additional income. Therefore, lack of assets, and particularly land, forces one or more family members to look for paid work opportunities. Many of the kinds of jobs available to the poor are seasonal. Rural women, and sometimes even children, may be involved as well as men. Both males and females in poorer areas have few opportunities.

The ability of the rural poor to participate in labour markets is influenced by a number of factors. These apply both to men and to women, but can have an even greater impact on women.

• The remoteness of where the poor live and the lack of road access. These will obviously affect travel to labour markets on a regular basis. When women need to combine household and child-care responsibilities with paid work, extra hours of travel can make working impossible. Remoteness will also reduce the chances that small rural industry will enter the area.
• Lack of transport. Even where passable rural roads exist, the poor may not benefit from them because of a lack of transport. For cultural as well as economic reasons, women will be less likely than men to have access even to non-motorized vehicles such as bicycles or animal transport. Where the poor need to pay for transport to jobs, these vehicles can use up much of the income they earn.
• Lack of education and skills. This is not only a matter of the possession of literacy and technical skills, but also of workplace and, in the case of many minorities, language skills. Absence of these skills will marginalize the poor from opportunities outside their immediate environment and tends to confine them to low-wage work in agriculture, where available. Women's usually lower educational levels aggravates these factors.
• Discrimination in labour markets. This often affects not just ethnic minorities but also women. The report notes that discrimination is not a matter of wage differentials (which seldom exceed 10%), but more a question of exclusion of females from better jobs because of educational or cultural discrimination.
• Social norms. These tend both to restrict women's participation in the labour market and to label certain types of work as appropriate or inappropriate. The IFAD report refers to cases in India and Pakistan where women's low participation in the labour force is as much the result of social norms as of other constraints. However, there are also instances when social norms bar men from work opportunities that might otherwise be attractive.
• Conflict with other responsibilities. This restricts both men's and women's access. Casual workers tend to be employed during peak agricultural periods for tasks such as weeding, ploughing and harvesting. This often clashes with labour needs on small farmers' own land. Sometimes distant labour markets also mean temporary migration to other areas. The case of seasonal labour in cotton production in coastal areas in Peru for people living in the Andean mountains is a case in point. Women there often take over absent men's farming tasks and are therefore themselves eliminated from labour markets. Peruvian women are also constrained by their domestic responsibilities, particularly the care of young children.

Women's domestic responsibilities, particularly childcare, are of course related to age, marital status and type of household. Such responsibilities are taken into consideration when a decision is made as to whether a woman should work outside the home, particularly when long hours of travel are involved. In some cultures, women take their young children along when they work as day labourers, but it becomes more difficult when they have a number of young children. Child-care facilities are rare in rural areas. In extended families or joint households, this problem can be more easily resolved. An IFAD study in the Guizhou province of China found differences in day labour for women from joint and those from nuclear households.

In the Andean mountains of Peru, it is not surprising that the highest female participation in wage labour is among young, single women who can be spared from household work. These women generally migrate to cities and larger towns. For decades there has been a drift of such rural women to urban areas to work as domestic servants. When they themselves have children, they are often forced to make a transition to street vending or other low-income informal-sector work, unless they can break the cycle through education. Even then, for indigenous people, the benefits are not automatic. As the IFAD study points out, in Peru, Spanish-speaking workers have higher returns from schooling than indigenous people.

Wage labour is not usually a preferred option of rural women in the developing world. There are rarely good opportunities available, and the opportunities that do exist tend to be distant, seasonal, poorly paid and have costs in terms of placing burdens on women's domestic responsibilities. Consequently, poorer rural women prefer employment opportunities close to home and that allow them to perform child-care and other domestic tasks.

Adapted from:

IFAD. 2001. Rural Poverty Report 2001: The Challenge of Ending Rural Poverty. Oxford University Press. February.

He Zhongua and Xi Yuhua. 1996. The Investigation Report of IFAD about Miao and Dong Nationality Autonomous Prefecture in Southeast Guizhou Province, Rome: IFAD.