Building Better Lives for Working Poor Women

Overview

Women are heavily overrepresented in low-value and unstable work. Their unpaid and largely unrecognised caring work within the household greatly limits their choice of employment. This ‘time poverty’, as well as lack of mobility, limits women’s access to training and information and reduces their chances of improving their livelihoods. We therefore need to address both gendered power relations in households and communities and women’s power in markets.

This paper explores innovative approaches for working with working-poor women and men ‘stuck’ in low-value, unstable, unregulated, high-risk and low-productivity economic activities. It is based on consultation with a wide range of organisations: geographically and economically diverse, concerned with women in different sectors and forms of livelihoods, and coming from a wide spectrum of conceptual frameworks and theoretical models for the development of working-poor women’s livelihoods.