Briefing Paper

Time Allocation on Productive and Domestic Work: The Unintended Consequences of Cash Transfers on Women’s Workload

Gender imbalance denies society a pool of diverse potentials and essential contribution to improving people’s lives. There have been various initiatives such as Productive Social Safety Net (PSSN) to transform gender relations to attain poverty reduction and sustainable development goals. Conditional Cash Transfers (CCTs), one of PSSN, is one of the popular programmes like microfinance schemes, which have a dual purpose of reducing poverty and empowering women. But there is a heated debate on whether CCTs empower women because, women already have a high workload, and they perform some traditional men’s roles. The purpose of this policy brief is to simplify the analysis and summarise the key findings on the domain of time and their policy-related implication and recommendation. The summary will help readers, including policymakers, to grasp key policy messages, implications, and recommendations to further gender transformation initiatives.