The participation rate of women in India's labour force is not only one of the lowest in the world, it has also been declining. To increase women's employment, some observers argue for reducing occupational gender segregation so that more women enter non-traditional jobs.
I ask how aspirations for non-traditional jobs are formed among young women in Delhi. The aim was to enable policy-makers to foster occupational aspirations for non-traditional jobs so women could enter jobs considered to be men's work, reducing gender segregation and increasing women's participation in the labour market.
I interviewed 72 young women from low-income households in Delhi, following a semi-structured guide. These young women were training either in jobs seen as the preserve of men—taxi drivers, electricians, and electronics mechanics—or in traditionally female work in beauty salons.
Contrary to conventional wisdom, young women's entry into non-traditional training in Delhi was not a result of their occupational aspirations. Rather, entry into training saw them aspire to the jobs for which they trained.
To increase women's entry into jobs dominated by men, policy-makers do not need to influence young women's occupational aspirations. Instead, they should focus on factors that directly affect job entry—for example, having training centres close to where these young women live—and provide opportunities for young women to train.
Traditional concepts of occupational aspirations, generally derived from the global North, do not apply in the same way to young women in India. My study raises questions about these conceptions of aspirations and prompts future studies to assess whether they apply in other parts of the global South.
Child streetism, a concept that describes the desperate situations of children working, living, or surviving on the street, is a complex phenomenon and one of the challenges posed by urban poverty worldwide.
The increased study of street children in Nigerian urban centres over the last 10 years has seen the accumulation of evidence underpin new policies to address this worldwide problem. This article summarizes the determinants of child streetism, the risks associated with it (violence, street gangsterism, drugs and substance abuse), and the intervention policies and programmes for street children in Nigeria.
The article is based on a textual narrative synthesis analysis of the relevant literature published between 2012 and 2023.
Analysis of the literature shows that street children engage in harmful and risky behaviours and are caught in a cycle of abuse and poverty. Interventions to help street children are generally hampered by a lack of understanding of the causes, impacts, situations, and general characteristics. The literature suggests that the most successful interventions typically capitalize on people's strengths, incorporate elements of participation, self-help, and mutual support, and take the least stigmatizing approach.
Child streetism is an expression of a complicated web of determinants that require structural solutions. Any policy addressing the problem of child streetism must consider the phenomenon as a product of several complex and interrelated factors. Of these, uncontrolled urbanization, poor urban planning and management, and poverty are the most obvious.
Investing in girls' schooling in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) is seen as central to improving gender equity. It is argued that interventions to promote girls' enrolment are appropriate as girls face gendered barriers to school enrolment and completion and investing in girls' schooling has high economic and human development returns. But is this fair to boys and enough for girls?
We ask how appropriate it is to direct development assistance towards improving girls' school enrolment, compared to prioritizing schooling for both girls and boys, and addressing barriers to gender equality throughout the life course.
We frame the enquiry through a human development framework with three distinct but interdependent domains: protection of human development potential; realization of human development potential; and use of human development potential.
Using publicly available data, we identify indicators that are likely to be correlated with the degree to which human development potential is protected, realized, and utilized in LMICs. We compare male and female outcomes on each of these indicators to assess gender parity at different life stages.
In most regions, girls are ahead of boys in both school enrolment and completion. Girls have better outcomes than boys in several other indicators in early life and childhood.
In adolescence and adulthood, girls and women fall behind boys and men. This is especially apparent in workforce participation, in unemployment, in pay, and in share of unpaid care work and political participation, where women have less favourable outcomes than men. The bias against women is most marked in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa.
A focus on girls' schooling should be tempered by ensuring quality pre-primary, primary, and secondary schooling for both boys and girls. At the same time, we must address causes of gender inequality, including labour market discrimination and social norms that justify the exclusion and exploitation of women and girls.
Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in low- and middle-income countries (L&MICs) often deliver services that high-income states might themselves provide, such as education and health care. But such service provision usually requires NGOs to engage with the state. Whether NGO–government relations affect NGO service provision to beneficiaries is not well studied.
We assess how NGO–government relations affect the reported outcomes of NGO service provision. We look at evidence from 1980 to 2014, a time when NGOs grew in number and activity. We consider five types of relatively constructive relations between NGOs and states along a spectrum from high to low engagement: collaboration, contracting, consultation, advocacy, and substitution.
We reviewed 109 articles from academic journals on NGOs working in education and health in L&MICs published between 1980 and 2014. These articles describe the activities of both international and domestic NGOs working at both national and subnational levels. We coded articles for content to allow detection of associations.
First, authors overwhelmingly report favourable outcomes from NGO service provision, regardless of the nature of the NGO–government relationship. Second, collaborative, advocacy, and substitutive relationships are most often associated with favourable outcomes. This is especially true in democratic states. Third, subnational NGO service provision is more frequently associated with favourable outcomes. Fourth, NGO service provision in low-income and African countries is disproportionately associated with reports of unfavourable or null outcomes.
Governments and development agencies should prioritize collaboration and engagement at the subnational level, create space for NGO advocacy, and redouble efforts to understand what drives favourable outcomes in low-income countries.
The eradication of poverty is one of Mexico's greatest challenges. This challenge is even greater for Indigenous communities, where seven out of 10 people were living in poverty in 2018. Despite the economic, social, and cultural impacts on Indigenous people, there has been scant literature addressing the determinants of Indigenous poverty in Mexico, while studies on the Guerrero Mountain Region (GMR) are scarcer still.
This study aims to identify the socioeconomic and contextual determinants of income and multidimensional poverty in the GMR, one of the poorest regions in Mexico and Latin America, inhabited primarily by Indigenous people.
We use data on 989 individuals in the GMR, collected during the 2018 Socioeconomic Conditions Module of Mexico's National Household Income and Expenditure Survey. To examine the main determinants of individual poverty, we use Bayesian logistic regression (BLR), which allows us to use the data to update information about the parameters and evaluate their distributional properties. The method simplifies multi-causal elements by classifying them into categories of well-being that incorporate more than economic factors.
The income-poor population is also multidimensionally poor. Education helps to reduce poverty as households that spend more on schooling are less likely to be poor. Households with many members, those with high dependency ratios, and those with members living with disability all tend to be poor. Households with access to landlines and the internet are less likely to be poor.
More diagnosis of poverty is needed. This should consider overlapping vulnerabilities (institutional, socioeconomic, environmental, and sociocultural) in this region for each Indigenous group. Public policies need to be monitored for performance.
Promoting coherence for sustainable development (PCSD) is a key means of implementation for the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, yet it has been overlooked as policy discussions have focused predominantly on the financing of the agenda. The literature and policy debates about PCSD largely focus on processes and on OECD countries, and they neglect their political and normative dimensions. This article complements recent literature on PCSD by elaborating and testing a relational perspective on the concept.
To address these issues, this article elaborates a relational perspective that responds to the misrepresentation of third countries as passive recipients of (in)coherent OECD policy preferences.
The analysis presented summarizes the literature on the related concepts of PCSD and Policy Coherence for Development (PCD). On this basis, the article articulates a relational perspective on policy coherence that complements other critical perspectives in the literature. Subsequently, it explores the potential and relevance of this relational perspective by analysing how the fisheries policy preferences of the European Union interact with those of Ghana.
Overall, the analysis shows that a commitment to sustainable fisheries cannot be assumed for either the EU or Ghana. Furthermore, assessing the responsibilities of the EU and Ghana around sustainability and degrees of adherence is difficult due to the presence of other fishing nations and influences. In the context of the EU's ambitious policy framework, the continued overfishing in Ghanaian waters negatively affects the credibility and justification of its continued involvement. Policy dialogue between the EU and the Ghanaian government and accompanying EU technical assistance have supported changes to Ghanaian fisheries policies, but overfishing continues.
Discussions on promoting PCSD should be supported by more empirical research into the extent and manner that policy preferences consider by policy-makers to be coherent with the 2030 Agenda contribute to advancing the agenda in different country and regional contexts.
The Jordan Compact was signed in 2016 by the Government of Jordan and the European Union (EU) to allow 200,000 Syrian refugees to work in Jordan in exchange for better access to the EU market for Jordan's exports. This marked a transition for Jordan's humanitarian sector. However, while services did indeed expand and elements of labour transitions and livelihood support were included, these benefits were exclusively for Syrian refugees and Jordanians, with little consideration given to other vulnerable refugees and migrant workers.
We examine how the Jordan Compact affected refugee aid and inclusion for Syrians, and its effects on other refugees and migrant workers in Jordan.
We draw on media and news articles, reports from non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and the United Nations, Jordanian law and policy, and prior academic research. We analyse the content of key informant interviews with representatives of government, international organizations, and NGOs conducted in August 2019. We use observations from the author's experience as a development worker in Jordan from 2016 to 2020.
Situated in an increasingly complex debate on the differential reception of refugees, we show differential treatment of refugees beyond reception and border policy. The selective, temporary, nationality-based legalization of refugee labour is intrinsically linked to the nature of refugeehood, whereby governments cannot maintain strict short-term limits on residency as they can with migrant labour.
Although women continue to bear an unequal burden when it comes to unpaid housework and care work regardless of the level of economic progress, a systematic analysis of the gender gap in terms of the time allocated to these responsibilities has not been carried out in the context of India so far, primarily due to the lack of national-level data.
This article measures how the burden of unpaid housework and care work is shared between men and women and investigates the factors associated with the allocation of time.
We use the first nationally representative Time Use Survey (2019) data of India and employ Blinder–Oaxaca decomposition analysis to explain the gender gap in unpaid housework and care work.
After accounting for individual characteristics and household factors, the regression analysis shows that women spend a little over three hours more per day on unpaid housework and 20 minutes more on unpaid care work than men. The decomposition analysis reveals that the differences in socioeconomic and demographic factors between men and women only contribute a small part of the average gender gap in unpaid housework and care work. In other words, most of the gap in unpaid work at home between men and women in India can be attributed to structural factors, including inadequate infrastructural support and social programmes to alleviate the burden of housework and childcare, as well as the prevalence of unobserved gender norms and practices that pin the responsibility of unpaid housework and care work on women.
To achieve equitable distribution of unpaid work between women and men, there is a need to provide more opportunities for women to participate in remunerative paid employment. Infrastructural support and policies that can reduce the burden of time spent by women in day-to-day unpaid housework and care activities are crucial to reduce the gender gap.
With rising unemployment in South Africa, new forms of digital work transcend legal conceptions and discourses on work. Uber's digital labour platform (DLP) has the potential to reduce unemployment and improve the livelihoods of South African households.
We examine the nature of employment through digital platforms to assess how such employment conforms to labour law and regulation in South Africa, the responsibility of the Department of Employment and Labour (DEL).
We review the literature on the gig economy, decent work, and labour relations. We examine Uber DLP in South Africa to assess its potential to create decent work given DEL's current labour regulations. We analyse factors that harm the relationship between Uber DLP and DEL.
Despite numerous constitutional provisions governing DLP and DEL, Uber DLP workers in South Africa are considered independent contractors not entitled to employee benefits. Uber DLP employees in South Africa make less than the national minimum wage after the platform deducts its fees. Few professional drivers own the cars they drive; they rent them from owners, known as “partners,” and split the earnings, meaning that the drivers earn very little.
DEL needs to establish a balance between flexibility and labour standards. DEL should preserve workers' rights and ensure financial stability in the digital age. Labour laws should be updated based on reliable data while considering the effects of digitally enabled employment on society and the economy. Platform workers need the same protection at work as other workers.
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