Time poverty and women's participation in non-farm work: Evidence from rural Ethiopia

In most developing countries, rural women are still marginalized in many domains to work in the non-farm economy, partly because the persistent unequal division of domestic burdens leaves rural women time-constrained. Yet, time poverty has received little consideration in the context of women's participation in non-farm work. This study presents evidence on the effect of time poverty on rural women's participation in non-farm work based on cross-sectional data collected from 300 rural women. We use two-stage residual inclusion instrumental variable (2SRI-IV) and recursive bivariate probit methods to address potential endogeneity. We find that time poverty is prevalent with 6 out of 10 women having insufficient time for non-farm work. The empirical results indicate that time poverty reduces women's participation in non-farm work in rural Ethiopia. This study suggests that relaxing women's time constraints coupled with meaningful rural education and infrastructure access might be vital in spurring their participation in the non-farm sector.