âI work in the city and come home only once a month. My wife works at a nearby construction site in our village. Our c
Affordable Day Care, to Empower Women in India
LEVERAGING EVIDENCE FOR ACCESS AND DEVELOPMENT
Project Brief IFMR LEAD in collaboration with a Non-Governmental Organisation Seva Mandir, and McGill University is evaluating the impact of a day-care programme on a range of social and
INTERVENTION : SEVA MANDIR’S BALWADI PROGRAM
economic outcomes on participating mothers and children. This three-year evaluation (2014-2017) is supported by the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) under its Growth and Economic Opportunities for Women (GrOW) program.
NEED FOR CHILD CARE
Seva Mandir, a local NGO working in the state of Rajasthan in India, runs Balwadis or day care centers for children in the 1-5 year age group in the village hamlets of Udaipur district. • The Balwadis operate at the hamlet level from 9:00 am to 4:00 pm • They provide a safe place for the children, managed by a woman from the community • They provide pre-school education “If there are young children in the house, the women have to stay home to take care of them. Who else will look after the children?”
“I work in the city and come home only once a month. My wife works at a nearby construction site in our village. Our children, ages 4 and 6, stay at home alone in the day.”
• They provide three nutritious meals a day to the children
OUTPUTS
Baseline Survey • Study Area: 160 hamlets in Udaipur district of Rajasthan • Sample size: 3,177 mothers with children in the 1-6 year age group • Height and weight measurements of all children in the 1-6 year age group
Change in mothers’ time allocation; more number of children being vaccinated; improved education indicators of siblings
OUTCOMES
On average women spend 17 minutes a day on any kind of paid work, whereas they spend 9.5 hours (~565 minutes) on unpaid domestic and agricultural work. A signi icant time spent on domestic Removal of barriers in access to economic opportunities can promote women's participation in the labour force. This can foster increased participation in household decision-making processes as well.
work is allocated towards caring for children and the elderly.
CURRENT STATUS OF HOUSEHOLD DECISION MAKING AND CHILDREN’s HEALTH AND NUTRITION
Improved health indicators and nutritional status of children
IMPACT Programme recipients : The immediate bene iciaries of the programme are women and children in 80 hamlets of south Rajasthan, where the Balwadis will be set up over the course
A signi icant proportion of women are not involved in making decisions pertaining to their household or self.
of the project. Expansion and scaleups : Actionable evidence generated from the impact evaluation will be bene icial in identifying
Nutritional Status of Children
the potential for scaling up programmes such as Seva Mandir’s, measuring its cost - effectiveness, and feeding into improvements in programme design and delivery. Knowledge creation and transfer : The project will ill vital gapsin existing literature on the impact of childcare support on women’s empowerment in India. We expect to translate research indings into action by working in collaboration with Government and Non-governmental organizations focused on poverty alleviation, gender equity and improving health outcomes in India and similar developing contexts.
Nearly 70 percent of children in the sample are underweight and stunted.
IFMR LEAD is an India-based non-pro it research organization that conducts high-quality scalable action research and outreach in development economics and inance, in the South Asian region. www.ifmrlead.org For more information on the project, please contact:
[email protected] 