Why time banking is a crucial tool to empower women

Context: Unpaid work is crucial for development of the society and economy, but is often invisible. Women perform 75% of the world’s unpaid care work.

The largest source of women’s unpaid labor is domestic work. These include household chores like grocery shopping, cooking, cleaning as well as caregiving to the children, elderly and infirm.

What is time poverty?

Time poverty is defined as “not having enough time” to pursue interests beyond unpaid domestic/ care work.

Unpaid labour is often devalued by men and creates time poverty. The situation leads to emotional strain.

Time poverty has a direct bearing on the ability of women to contribute to or participate in the labour market and/or public or political life, leading to declining female labour force participation rate.

What is time banking?

Time banking can be viewed as an opportunity cost of an unpaid activity in terms of the time sacrificed. In time banks, one hour equals one time credit, regardless of the service being performed or the level of each person’s skill or gender.

Time-banking can benefit women, their families and their communities by alleviating time poverty through the system of exchange services through time credits.

For each hour of a service exchanged, the service provider receives one, time credit and the beneficiary pays one, time credit.

What are the benefits?

There are time banks operating in more than 30 countries in the Americas, Africa and Europe as well as in Russia and China. Time bank networks can be utilised for increasing political participation of women in the following ways:

• Directly: Through utilisation of time credits for campaigning for office
• Indirectly: By educating themselves or others on local issues or understanding their rights, accessing government programs and mobilising others.

Across the world, there are examples in our everyday life of intra- and inter-family examples of informal time-sharing. However, for tangible results on a community or economy scale, the concept needs scaling up and formalisation.

How to formalise time banking?

The most relevant case study on time banks is that of Senegal, where time banking was made a formal system and integrated into a vocational training centre for women. It allowed women to earn time credits by working at the centre or caring for members’ children and exchange them for classes and workshops.

To make time banks a formal set up, GRADES introduced a simple framework. Each member of the community identified needs that he or she can address. The community then translated the service performed by the individual into time credits which could be exchanged for hours beyond unpaid work.

Way forward:

Time banking, if made a formal arrangement, has the potential to act as the catalyst to women empowerment by formally recognising the economic value of unpaid labour and tapping the same across communities.

Source: This post is created based on the article “Why time banking is a crucial tool to empower women” published on 13/April/2022 in Down to Earth.