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Gender gaps in agriculture are persistent, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa (Kristjanson et al., 2015). Many gaps stem from the fact that women in farm households are often overburdened by their responsibilities for both reproductive and productive labor (Arora, 2015). Intra-household distribution of work is “dictated by social norms that put women at a disadvantage” (Arora and Rada, 2017, p. 93); this often results in gendered time poverty (Blackden and Wodon, 2006; United Nations, 2020), one aspect of the multidimensional nature of poverty in rural Africa (Alkire, 2018).

Time poverty is a condition wherein people lack time for rest and leisure because their working hours are so long (Blackden and Wodon, 2006), and they have no possibility of reducing their working hours without falling (further) into economic poverty (Bardasi and Wodon, 2010). Many studies, including those employing the Women’s Empowerment in Agricultural Index (WEIA) tool, use 10.5 h per day as the time poverty line (Alkire et al., 2013; Adeyeye et al., 2021), while others have used thresholds of 12 h (Gammage, 2010; Arora, 2015), or 1.5 times the median hours worked (Lawson, 2008; Bardasi and Wodon, 2010). Gendered time poverty relates to differences in men’s and women’s “ability to change their schedule, their control or influence over their time use, and unequal time burdens” (Eissler et al., 2022, p. 1022).

While time poverty can also be experienced by men (Lawson, 2008; Soh Wenda and Fon, 2021), many labor-saving innovations in agricultural settings focus on productive activities dominated by male control. Further, Africa has yet to undergo the structural transformations in the household, including domestic labor-saving mechanization, that have taken place in developed countries (Dinkelman and Ngai, 2022). Due to patriarchal social norms, rural African women also have lower levels of time-use agency – an individual’s ability to determine what they do with their time in order to reach their goals – which is an important element of empowerment (Eissler et al., 2022).

Consequently, “time poverty is exacerbated among women in [African] agriculture” (Adeyeye et al., 2021). Women in Africa work up to 13 h more per week than men (FAO, 2009), and rural women dedicate more time to unpaid care work than those living in urban areas (Charmes, 2019). Indeed, women’s unequal responsibility for household work makes up most of the gender disparity in time poverty. Around the world, women provide more than 75% of the hours dedicated to household reproduction¹; there are no countries where men spend more time on household work (Charmes, 2019). In many countries where this data is collected, as in Benin and Tanzania, women spend more time now on unpaid care work and less time on income-generating work than they did a decade or two prior, while men spend less time on unpaid care work (Charmes, 2019). Women contribute critical labor in agriculture, too, much of which is also unpaid and often rendered invisible (Lentz et al., 2019).

Time poverty is a root cause of women’s marginalization in many sectors, including agriculture, and impacts their own welfare as well as that of others (Alkire et al., 2013). In a comparative study of seven African countries, workload emerged as the primary cause of disempowerment in three countries, and in the top three causes in a fourth (Meinzen-Dick et al., 2019). Time poverty inhibits women’s ability to obtain and maintain paid work, adopt agricultural technologies, and participate fully in food production, and can negatively impact their ability to take full advantage of a wide range of agricultural interventions, such as extension services, financial services, accessing inputs, and finding support in producer organizations (World Bank, 2009; Floro and Komatsu, 2011; Whillans and West, 2022). Men’s failure to contribute their labor to unpaid reproductive work means that, even when women do participate in income-generating activities, they lose free time as they must still assume responsibility for reproductive work (Miedema, 2021). The many competing claims on women’s time result in inefficient tradeoffs and cause physical and mental stress (Arora and Rada, 2017), leading to negative consequences for - amongst others - household income as well as personal income (Blackden and Wodon, 2006; Kes and Swaminathan, 2006), nutrition (Njuki et al., 2016; Johnston et al., 2018), women’s access to formal medical care (Adeyeye et al., 2019), investments in children, and future poverty reduction (Bardasi and Wodon, 2010). Women’s high time commitments and responsibilities for reproductive work is a core indicator for gender inequality, and results in women having contaminated leisure or less time for leisure in general (Giurge et al., 2020). Further, leisure is a fundamental component of welfare and human rights, and enables the expansion of social networks and the development and deepening of social relationships, which are linked to pathways out of poverty (Lawson and Hulme, 2007).

For these reasons, recognizing women’s unpaid work and the ways social norms influence intrahousehold time use is fundamental for understanding and addressing gender inequities in well-being (Quisumbing et al., 1995; Arora and Rada, 2017). Identifying and disassembling gendered inequity in workload is a part of efforts to promote human rights and development. Target 5.4 of the Sustainable Development Goals is aimed at ‘recogniz[ing] and valu[ing] unpaid care and domestic work through… the promotion of shared responsibility within the household and family’ (UN Women, 2015). “Decent working time” is also central to the International Labour Organization’s goal of “promoting opportunities for women and men to obtain decent and productive work in conditions of freedom, equity, security and human dignity” (ILO, 1999; Bardasi and Wodon, 2010). Therefore, time use is a critical focus of gender studies and feminist economics, and research on the livelihood and survival strategies of the poor (Bardasi and Wodon, 2010; Arora and Rada, 2017; Stevano et al., 2019).

While research on gendered time poverty in high-income countries has a long history, far fewer studies investigate these issues in other parts of the world, and there is “still a large knowledge gap regarding women’s time use and time allocation on the [African] continent” (Dinkelman and Ngai, 2022, p. 59). As Stevano et al. (2019, p. 2) argues, “methodologies should be broad enough to encompass household socioeconomic status, composition, seasonality, and work intensity, as well as a focus on gendered relations rather than women’s time use exclusively.” Yet research in Africa has mainly not done this and, further, men and women are typically analyzed as internally homogeneous categories, overlooking within-group differences. Most studies use quantitative methodologies applied to secondary data sources, making it difficult to untangle the relationships underpinning inequities in time use. There is also scant evidence about the impact of development interventions on gendered time use (Johnston et al., 2018). Some women’s empowerment programs have been found, paradoxically, to increase gendered time poverty (Adeyeye et al., 2021), as have efforts to increase agricultural productivity and women’s incomes (EIAR, 2012). We know even less about how women’s time is impacted by contemporary trends in Africa including commercialization of agricultural production (Kennedy and Cogill, 1988), male out-migration, and the feminization of agriculture. This lack of basic understanding of how time poverty operates in rural African farming households inhibits progress toward the goals of development research and practice.

In an effort to add nuance to our understanding of gendered time poverty amongst farm households in rural Africa, we conducted a qualitative study in early 2020 in the Kaolack region in the Groundnut Basin of Senegal. This region, typified by large, multigenerational, and often polygamous households situated in close communities impacted by irregularly patterned seasons where family members presence and roles are in flux, changing both with the weather and over their life course, presents an opportune site for us to example the way these interacting factors converge to produce systemic and gendered inequities and agricultural inefficiencies.

The goal of the research is to open the “black box” of the farm household, using a qualitative approach to understand the concept, experience, drivers, and dynamic nature of time use and time poverty for men, boys, girls, and women over the life course within the particular cultural and geographic context of Kaolack, Senegal. As De Vreyer and Lambert (2020, p. 2) note, “inter-personal inequality in living standards within households is a largely uncharted territory.” Few studies compare men, women, and children’s time use, or investigate how relationships between household members influence labor allocation and levels of time poverty (Ilahi, 2000; Sow, 2010; Doss, 2013; Johnston et al., 2018; Daum et al., 2021). We also differentiate beyond “male” and “female,” to explore how sex intersects with other social categories in the context of time use and allocation. Finally, this research adds to our understanding of time use dynamics within (1) polygynous² households, which are under-examined, and (2) within Senegal, which is likewise underrepresented: Senegal is not one of the 11 African countries that collect time use data in regular household surveys (Charmes, 2019; Dinkelman and Ngai, 2022) and we found just one (quantitative) study of time allocation in the country (Sow, 2010).

Time use and time poverty have been investigated for decades, starting in the 1970s with Vickery (1977), who defined time poverty as a 12-h workday. Time use itself has been used to understand gendered relations across many situations, but is more heavily deployed in Europe, Canada, and the USA countries (Bardasi and Wodon, 2010; Dinkelman and Ngai, 2022). However, given the low deployment in the rest of the world, there are several gaps in both time-use study methodologies and theoretical frameworks.

In sub-Saharan Africa, time-use studies frequently rely on interview and recall techniques as study populations are often not fully literate. There are logistical difficulties in deploying these studies, related to the interviewing techniques and differences in understanding what constitutes work (Bamji and Thimayamma, 2000; Abdourahman, 2010). Importantly, time-use studies may not adequately capture women’s work. To begin with, women often have many jobs, more so than men (Charmes, 2006). Men typically complete tasks sequentially, whereas women complete tasks simultaneously (Blackden and Wodon, 2006). Reporting simultaneous tasks can pose a problem-how many activities should be reported if a woman is performing childcare, preparing a meal, and cleaning laundry at the same time (Lentz et al., 2019)? Consequently, simultaneous activities are likely underreported, posing challenges for assessing work intensity (Blackden and Wodon, 2006; Lentz et al., 2019). Finally, surveys that use statistics as a framework for measuring time use often mask women’s work in agriculture, primary production, or trade activities (Charmes, 2006). There are difficulties in activity definition; many questionnaires fail to adequately measure non-market economy work, and time-use studies can be myopic in establishing what ‘counts’ as work (Abdourahman, 2010; Johnston et al., 2015). Time-use studies frequently embody the researchers’ value judgments of what constitutes work (Whitehead, 1999). Not only can women’s work be invisible to the surveyors, but it can also be invisible to the participants themselves: women often fail to categorize care as work (Arora, 2015). Therefore, women’s work is underreported in many time-use studies (Lentz et al., 2019). Additionally, many surveys do not capture seasonal variations in time use or work intensity, especially in Africa, Asia and Latin America (Charmes, 2015; Johnston et al., 2015, 2018).

There is much evidence globally that women work more hours in the day than men. Women’s work can amount to almost twice that of a man’s (Arora, 2015), and the ratio of time in unpaid work from men to women is more than double parity; in Mali, it can range from 2.3 to 14. Women often spend more time on farm work (Arora, 2015), and produce between 60 to 80% of food in low-income countries (Ransom and Bain, 2011), yet it is estimated that women are energy deficient for nearly 6 months of the year (Haswell, 1981). There is evidence that women experience more time poverty and contaminated leisure overall (Arora, 2015), where contaminated leisure is defined as work done during leisure time, usually childcare (Bittman and Wajcman, 2000; Mattingly and Blanchi, 2003). Finally, women who work outside of the home spend almost as much time as housewives on childcare and housework, with the difference being under 30 min per day, despite having spent 5–7 h performing income-generating activities.

The work women do is not limitless, or free, and time spent doing certain activities may take away from a woman’s ability to do other, more productive work (Komatsu et al., 2018). Women are typically responsible for taking care of children, the sick and elderly (Kes and Swaminathan, 2006) and ensuring their nutritional needs are met. Increased time in agriculture can result in a decrease in the quality of care for children or themselves-care may be skipped, reduced in frequency, or substituted (Komatsu et al., 2018). Women also must contend with tradeoffs between market and household responsibilities-women will take lower-paying jobs in order to be able to continue providing childcare. However, women’s time constraints can be offset by the presence of other household members who can substitute their reproductive work-primarily older daughters (Kes and Swaminathan, 2006), or older women (Johnston et al., 2015). However, there is evidence that the care provided by other children is of lower quality than the care provided by women (Komatsu et al., 2018). In many polygynous households, women rotate duties (Barret and Browne, 1994), as was seen in our study where families lived in semi-communal dwellings. However, household structures and hierarchical structures are permeable and can shift and change quickly. The groups that consume and the groups that produce are not always the same (Guyer and Peters, 1987), nor static, and men and women living in the same household may not pool their incomes or make all expenditure decisions jointly (Glick and Sahn, 1998). Different types of households (such as male-or female-headed) and the ages of the workers will influence the activities done by individuals (Whitehead, 1999).

In Sub-Saharan Africa, time spent on agricultural duties competes with domestic duties and may displace activities such as sleep, rest, or leisure (Johnston et al., 2015). Although the common assertion that African women contribute 60–80% of labor for agriculture has been contested (Palacio-Lopez et al., 2018), women do devote significant time to agricultural work, and are often responsible for food processing, crop transportation and storage, weeding and hoeing, while men frequently do most of the land clearing, planting, and crop maintenance (Haswell, 1981; Kes and Swaminathan, 2006; Boserup, 2007). In poor households in Ghana, women spend more time in agricultural work than women in non-poor households (Komatsu et al., 2018). Women must rely on men for access to agricultural land in many parts of West Africa and, in Senegal, men have sometimes taken productive land by establishing approval councils that consist exclusively of men in order to displace women (Nation, 2010; Komatsu et al., 2018).

For many purposes, women are considered helpers to men as opposed to individual economic actors (Ransom and Bain, 2011; Petrics et al., 2015). Both men and women face time constraints, but women experience more severe tradeoffs-paid work and unpaid work can take place simultaneously (Komatsu et al., 2018). Additionally, the gendered division of labor is not determined by education levels or land ownership, but rather societal norms (Arora, 2015). Finally in an effort to focus on women’s time use, men’s information may not be collected which can have ramifications for deducing how women’s time use and poverty relate to the household (Johnston et al., 2015).

Women may not be able to access information or services to improve their productivity due to time constraints as well. Evidence shows that women are more likely to adopt innovations (such as climate-friendly practices) when they are made aware of them (Kristjanson et al., 2017). However, women often say they do not have the time to sit and listen to information that may improve their productivity and time restraints prevent mobility needed to seek out extension services (Goh, 2012; Jost et al., 2015; Petrics et al., 2015). Time-saving technology might not be sufficient to address women’s time burdens (Johnston et al., 2018). Additionally, climate shocks increase women’s time poverty directly by requiring more time to be spent in agricultural labor and activities (Goh, 2012; Jost et al., 2015; Chaudhuri et al., 2021). Finally, agricultural interventions often require increased time commitments (Johnston et al., 2018) and can result in women spending less time working in feeding or food preparation (Johnston et al., 2015; Chaudhuri et al., 2021).

Our research adds to the growing body of literature that shows rural women in the majorityworld are dual-burdened by their responsibilities for productive and reproductive work. Reflecting findings from other studies of rural Africa (e.g., Johnston et al., 2018), women in Kaolack play a critical role in agriculture. This includes providing the care work necessary to support family members engaged in agricultural work and labor for production. Women and older girls further play an important role in weeding and peanut harvesting and are largely responsible for the time-consuming and often painful task of post-harvest peanut sorting and shelling. Indeed, in her study of time use in Kaolack, Sow (2010) found women devote more time than their husbands to peanut cultivation (3.5 h/day compared to 3.2) but receive little of the income.

This double burden means women in rural Kaolack are, in general, more time-poor than men across the life course and consequently have less time for sleep, leisure, and engagement in wage-earning work (Figure 3). When women have free time, they reportedly spend it first on additional care work (e.g., braiding hair, cooking more elaborate meals, or increasing stocks of fuel and water), and then on leisure. To a lesser extent, and typically only for women in the mother-in-law role or with unmarried daughters over the age of 15 or 16, women in Kaolack spend free time on income-generating activities. This aligns with what Sow (2010) found: when women are significantly burdened by housework, they are less likely to engage in off-farm income-generating work, or can only do so at the expense of their own – or other women and children’s – rest and leisure time. Men who are not experiencing time poverty also spend their surplus time on leisure and market work, but they still have more hours to dedicate to relaxation and sleep, larger activity spaces, and more diverse and profitable income-generating opportunities. Tables 3, 4 illustrate stylized daily time use schedules in the rainy and dry seasons for individuals belonging to different sex-age-role categories, based on real examples from our interviews.

Work intensity – often defined as energy expenditure – is overlooked in the literature (Stevano et al., 2019). In Kaolack, men’s work in agriculture and animal husbandry is physically demanding, a fact reported frequently by our participants. However, they contribute relatively little to the domestic work of childcare, cooking, cleaning, and energy provision. This frees their time for wage-earning work, leisure, and social interaction. Further, women are also involved in energetically taxing work in the fields, pounding millet, and collecting and carrying fuelwood and water, sometimes with children on their backs; but they have little time for rest in between. Additionally, women’s work is often simultaneous, which is considered more stressful and tiring (Arora, 2015; Arora and Rada, 2017; Seymour et al., 2020).

Yet sex alone does not explain intra-and inter-household differences in time use and time poverty in Kaolack; many other variables interact to produce the observed inequities.

Age conditions individuals’ time use in our study households (Figure 3). As Posel and Grapsa (2017) note in South Africa, “the division of labor in multi-generational households is bisected by gender and age.” As a general rule, elders in Kaolack exhibit the lowest levels of time poverty. This supports research from several countries in Africa, which find elderly men and women are less likely to be time poor (Lawson, 2008; Bardasi and Wodon, 2010; Arora, 2015; Posel and Grapsa, 2017; Charmes, 2019). Older chefs du ménage in Kaolack rely on their sons and younger brothers to conduct agricultural work, and are consequently able to retire from productive labor. They spend the overwhelming majority of their time on leisure and personal care activities and managerial tasks. For the most part, elder mother-in-laws are likewise in retirement from productive and reproductive work. This echoes findings from Lesotho (Lawson, 2008). There, too, men and women over the age of 65 spend most of their time on personal care; elderly men spend a bit more time on production work while elderly women spend more on household maintenance. However, the Lesotho study found that neither group spends much time on caring activities, while our research in Kaolack suggests that elderly mothers-in-law often play a critical role in childcare, especially in the rainy season.

Prior research on the relationship between age, gender and time poverty for non-elderly people in Africa has produced mixed results. In Guinea, time poverty increases with age, up until individuals become elderly (Bardasi and Wodon, 2010). In Mozambique, however, the probability of time poverty decreased with age for adult women, which the author hypothesizes is because older women are less likely to have small children in need of significant direct care (Arora, 2015). Our research supports the finding from the Mozambican study but, in the Kaolack context, we hypothesize this is not only due to decreasing care requirements, but also because children over the age of 6 provide important labor for their mothers, and because of the specific dynamic between mothers-in-law and daughters-in-law. In contrast with the Guinean study, we find that women’s time poverty in rural Senegal does not linearly increase with age. In adulthood, women’s labor allocation and time use is more strongly influenced by familial dynamics and social hierarchies (discussed below). However, our results do suggest that, in childhood, workloads increase with age for both boys and girls. This is particularly the case for girls over the age of 15 or 16 attending school, who sometimes experience time poverty at higher rates than their mothers, with serious consequences for the performance and retention of girls in education.

The complex, multigenerational and polygamous nature of most households in our study area is important for understanding how individuals spend their time. Time use for all gender-age groups is influenced by the interaction of familial relationships with the size and composition of the household. Labor allocation depends on the extent to which individuals can shift labor from member to member, which pivots around gender and social hierarchies within the household.

However, while women and girls can be relied on to substitute their labor for masculinized or gender-neutral productive tasks, and younger boys assist with some domestic chores, men and older boys contribute very little to household production and to female tasks associated with farming (shelling, food processing and preparation). Therefore, in a general sense, men’s potential time poverty is reduced by the presence of other able-bodied, non-elderly men in the household, but also by the presence of healthy adult women, and children (especially boys) over the age of 10 or 12. By contrast, women’s potential time poverty is reduced by the presence of other able-bodied women (particularly co-wives and sisters-in-law) and children (especially girls) over the age of about 7; larger numbers of men in the household has the opposite effect of increasing women’s workload, particularly with respect to cooking and laundry.

This result aligns with findings from previous studies. For example, Sow (2010) found that women in Kaolack with female children have higher incomes, as a result of the latter providing substitute labor for housework. Similarly, married women are more time-poor in Guinea than single or never-married women (Bardasi and Wodon, 2010) and, in South Africa, elderly women’s time use patterns were found to depend on household composition: if there are other adult women in the house, they spend less time on domestic work and more on leisure and personal care (Posel and Grapsa, 2017). While we did not explicitly ask study participants whether monogamous women have more or less work than women living in polygamous households, the latter typically have more women and girls available for labor substitution. Research on monogamous households in Malawi has found that the presence of other adult female household members results in greater work sharing and less time-poverty (Nankhuni, 2004), while Guinean women in Christian households experienced higher rates of time poverty compared to women in Islamic households, who are more likely to be in polygamous unions (Bardasi and Wodon, 2010).

But the demographic distribution of the household further interacts with social hierarchies to produce differences in – especially women’s – time use and relative time poverty within and between age categories. Senior women in the households we interviewed experience less time poverty and more time-use agency than junior women. This is certainly the case for women whose sons have married; their workload drastically diminishes as a result due to norms surrounding their relationship with daughters-in-law. However, as Dinkelman and Ngai (2022, p. 76) note, “childcare constraints influence time allocation among a cross-generational array of women: mothers and their sisters, grandmothers, and older daughters.” mothers-in-law in Kaolack do watch young children, which frees up the daughters-in-law time to engage in productive activities including marketing and going to the field, as well as other reproductive activities. We also interviewed some women who, despite their advanced age, had no daughters-in-law and therefore remained entirely responsible for household work. Likewise, women whose husbands have died or migrated abroad may experience higher rates of time poverty because their agricultural workload increases. Figure 4 illustrates differences in women’s lifetime work burden according to changes in the demographic composition of their households.

Finally, we found that seasonality and physical landscape influence time use. We found strong seasonal differences in time use for all household members, and the likelihood of both men and women’s time poverty increases during the rainy season due to labor requirements for cultivation and, for women, an increase in household size as a result of return migration (Figure 5). Due to a number of factors, including climate change and deforestation, water and fuel are scarce in Kaolack and the women we interviewed spend a great deal of time on the provision of these resources. Research from Mozambique (Arora, 2015) and Nepal (Kumar and Hotchkiss, 1988) has similarly found that deforestation and water scarcity increased women’s workloads and decreased the time they could spend on farming and market activities; work in Peru found women who rely on biomass allocate more time to housework and less time to entrepreneurial/market activities than women who have access to modern fuels (Ilahi, 1999). In terms of infrastructure, Lawson (2008) found that individuals in Lesotho who live closer to infrastructure like schools and water sources are less likely to be time poor. This was reflected in our study as well, particularly in the stories of girls who had to leave school due to the amount of time it takes to walk there in combination with their responsibilities for household work. That said, some studies in rural Africa indicate that improved access to water and electricity result in a reallocation of women’s time from home work to leisure and market work (Dinkelman, 2011), while others find minor or no change in women’s time spent in household production (Kremer et al., 2011; Lee et al., 2020).

Resolving gender equity gaps in agricultural households requires a more profound understanding of intrahousehold labor allocation, time use, and time poverty. Our research provides additional nuance to feminist scholarship and practice seeking to disentangle these issues.

There are several implications for research and methodology. First, while most research moves beyond simple sex-disaggregation to consider the influence of age and household demographics on gendered time use, our findings point to the need to also investigate the influence of cultural norms, social relationships, and intrahousehold power dynamics along the individual and family life course. Time use is dynamic and complex and, as Pierotti et al. (2022) note, “intrahousehold negotiations over labor and time use are not just about maximizing efficiency or productivity, but also about maintaining social hierarchies, roles, and responsibilities.” Second, and relatedly, there is a need for more qualitative and mixed-methods research that allows for a consideration of those aforementioned drivers in ways that quantitative analysis does not permit. Third, the strong seasonal differences in time use we observed imply that static methods of time use data collection are ill-equipped to give a good picture of time use, poverty and agency within farming households. Fourth, more research should be conducted on polygamous households. Are existing methods for time use research sufficient? How do their rates of time poverty compare to monogamous households? How do social hierarchies between first and subsequent wives influence time use? Third, work intensity and drudgery are critical, overlooked, components of time use and the experience of decent work. Finding measures for these is important. Without it, the intensity of men’s work, too, is perhaps underappreciated. Fifth, we need more research on how interventions of various types affect individual’s time use and intrahousehold allocation of labor. And, finally, we join long-standing calls for the collection of data that reveals women’s work. The Beijing Platform for Action at the 1995 UN Fourth World Women’s Conference called for the implementation of regular, national time-use surveys so that women’s contributions and unremunerated work would be made visible; unfortunately, progress has been slow, especially in low-income countries (Esquivel, 2011).

To this last point, there are important implications for policy and practice. Technologies targeting reproductive activities and care work are critical for alleviating the workload of rural women. For example, improved cookstoves have been shown in Kaolack to free women’s time (Bensch and Peters, 2015); they might even help women with their productive activities, since women’s economic work often involves cooking. Perhaps surprisingly, housewives in America in 2010 spent about the same amount of weekly hours (45.7) on home production as African housewives (Dinkelman and Ngai, 2022); but the composition of the work is very different. African women spend more time on cooking, collecting fuel and water, and less time on care and household management. This indicates that the introduction of household innovations would at least free those women up to provide more intensive care, if not allow them to reallocate time to the market. Childcare in particular seems to inhibit African women’s ability to dedicate time to market activities (Dinkelman and Ngai, 2022). In urban Ghana, women who dropped out of the paid workforce usually had no other female relatives to care for their children (Heath, 2017). Childcare facilities, childcare subsidies, and community childcare centers can help address these types of gendered inequities in time poverty (World Bank, 2021).

That said, while time-saving technologies aimed at women’s activities are an important component of the solution to gendered time poverty in rural households, they may be ineffectual if implemented with a lack of understanding of the power dynamics and patriarchal norms (Arora, 2015) that keep women working in - and accepting - limited roles in the household and for many hours. Without a consideration of power, interventions to mitigate the time it takes women to do a certain activity may not in fact reduce their daily number of hours worked or overall workload (Johnston et al., 2018). For example, improving labor productivity in the home through, e.g., mechanization may lead to increased demands for household production (Dinkelman and Ngai, 2022). Policies and interventions that “foster changes in social norms [regulating the economic and reproductive activities of women] may have more permanent effects on women’s time allocation” (Kevane and Wydick, 2001, p. 119). While still understudied in Africa, there is evidence that men overestimate the social stigma associated with their participation in reproductive work (Bursztyn et al., 2020) and might be willing to reallocate their time to household work if those beliefs are challenged through locally-appropriate, sociobehavioral interventions.

Finally, much of the research and development practice related to gendered time poverty implicitly or explicitly has the goal of freeing women’s time so they can be more economically productive. Yet, in our study, many respondents – women and men – indicated that, if they had extra time, they would spend it on leisure, social activities, and personal care. Ultimately then, viewed through a feminist and emancipatory lens, our goal should be to release women and other individuals from unnecessarily burdensome or inequitable work so they can do what they want to do with their time.

The raw data supporting the conclusions of this article will be made available by the authors, without undue reservation.

The studies involving human participants were reviewed and approved by University of California, Santa Barbara. Written informed consent from the participants’ legal guardian/next of kin was not required to participate in this study in accordance with the national legislation and the institutional requirements.

JM-K, SB, and JB contributed to the conception and design of the study. JM-K, JB, CN, and MD collected the data. JM-K conducted the analysis, wrote the first draft of the manuscript, led subsequent revisions and writing, and developed Tables 1, 2 and Figures 1, 2. SB wrote the literature review and developed the conceptual models in Figures 3, 4 and 5. JB contributed to the conception and design of the study. All authors contributed to the article and approved the submitted version.

This study is made possible by the generous support of the American people through the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) through Cooperative Agreement No. 7200AA 18CA00003 to the University of Georgia as management entity for U.S. Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Peanut (2018–2023). The contents are the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of USAID or the United States Government.

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.