Rural Women and Unpaid Care Work: Gaps and Opportunities within International Law
Introduction
Human beings depend on care; societies and economies depend upon unpaid and paid care work to function.1 Unpaid care work is mostly provided within households or families and contributes an estimated US$11 trillion to the global economy each year. More than three quarters of this unpaid care work is performed by women and girls2, and this restricts their choices and opportunities, adversely affecting a wide variety of human rights, including the rights to work, social security, education, health, rest and leisure.3 Rural areas are often underserved, in terms of social and public infrastructure, transportation, childcare and health services, increasing the unequal share of unpaid care work4 performed by women and girls, further impacting the full realization of their human rights.
In our goal towards universal freedom, dignity and equality, and considering the complex variables and challenges rural women and girls encounter, it is vital that a human rights perspective be used to recognise and redress the realities faced by them.5 International human rights law can be a useful tool in this regard. Drawing on the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), particularly Article 14, and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas (UNDROP), this article analyses the normative gaps and opportunities within international human rights frameworks to address this systemic issue faced by rural women and girls in relation to the unpaid care work they perform. The article concludes by advocating for legal and institutional reforms, grounded in an intersectional approach, to advance the rights of rural women and girls.
What is “unpaid care work”?
Unpaid reproductive labour can be described using various terms, depending on disciplinary perspectives and research interests6, including unpaid domestic and care work, domestic labour, social reproduction, care work, caregiving, familial care, unpaid caregiving, and affective labour.7 For this article, the term ‘unpaid care work’ will be employed per the definition articulated during a roundtable convened in November 2022 by the United Nations Deputy Secretary-General, heads of UN agencies, and external experts:
‘Unpaid care work refers to services provided within a household or community for the benefit of its members without remuneration. It includes both direct care for people, such as children, family and community members, older persons or persons with mental or physical conditions, persons with disabilities, and indirect care, such as cooking, cleaning, washing, collecting water and fuel, and household management, including tending to animals and livestock and agricultural work for own consumption, as well as transportation and travel. This work also encompasses unpaid voluntary community care work, like community kitchens and peer support.’8
Factoring in unpaid care work is crucial, considering that every day, 16.4 billion hours are spent on it. When valued at hourly minimum wage, it amounted to 9 per cent of global GDP, which corresponds to US$11 trillion. Women and girls perform 76.2 per cent of this work, accounting for almost 12.5 billion hours. In no country in the world do men and women provide an equal share of unpaid care work, and based on region, women can spend anywhere between 1.7 times more (the Americas) to 4.7 times (the Arab States) on unpaid care.9 Even when one considers total work (paid and unpaid work), women, on average, across 82 countries, spend an extra 38 minutes each day. This gap in total work between men and women may seem minor, but it has several repercussions and consequences and cannot be ignored.10 For instance, gender divisions in care responsibility limit women’s access to decent work. In 2023, 708 million women, as opposed to 40 million men, aged 15 and above, cited care responsibilities as the reason for being outside the labour market.11
Rural women’s unpaid care work: a triple responsibility
Rural women account for approximately 22% of the global population12, nearly a quarter. Although not a globally homogenous group, and with only a few exceptions, rural and indigenous women fare worse than rural men, and their respective urban equivalents on every indicator for which data is available.13 The barriers and opportunities they face vary across their lifetimes and their circumstances, and are influenced by their location, socio-economic status, identity, ethnicity, political identity, citizenship status, and other factors.14 Furthermore, apart from the region, farming system and other changing conditions like seasons, markets, and climate, the lives of these women are often affected by changes occurring in the lives of their male counterparts. Some of these include seasonal changes in tasks leading to labour peaks, men’s migration or off-farm employment, which results in women taking over agricultural production and marketing, household purchases, and social and community duties.15 Rural women like smallholder farmers, livestock keepers, fishers, and so on, simultaneously manage triple responsibilities. As part of a paid workforce, they can be wage workers, self-employed individuals, or contribute to the family business, performing a variety of tasks in agricultural production and operations, marketing, and maintenance. Household tasks include caring for the children and the elderly, collecting firewood, cooking, fetching water and so on. Community work is linked to preserving culture and tradition, including organising for religious ceremonies and other such functions like funerals, weddings, community service, etc. 16 In developing countries, rural women’s tasks often add up to a 16-hour day.17
Unpaid care work is most intensive, and disproportionate for girls and women living in rural areas of low and middle-income countries because of the lack of basic services and infrastructure, such as adequate access to a water supply, sanitation, financial services, electricity, roads, safe transportation, time-saving technology, education, health care and other social protection policies and services. Climate change and other extreme weather events also increase household drudgery (limited availability of firewood, water scarcity, etc.) and have negative impacts on the health of family members, who would then require additional care.18
This exacerbated unpaid care work constrains rural women’s opportunities for better-paid work. In coping with household poverty, they are left to find work within the informal economy, which is often precarious and poorly paid. Unpaid care work cannot be reduced or outsourced by market substitutes like purchasing ready-made foods or hiring care workers. Furthermore, because of discriminatory social norms and gender stereotypes, these tasks cannot be distributed to men and boys. Often, unpaid care work is delegated to older children, particularly daughters, which might eventually jeopardise their education and other opportunities. This invariably creates a trap where they are likely to face both income poverty and time poverty19, alongside other deprivations like education, health, and so on, thereby inhibiting the ability of societies to achieve gender equality.20
CEDAW AND UNDROP: two main instruments for rural women rights
The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against (CEDAW, 1979) and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas (UNDROP, 2018), are to this day the two main international law instruments used in the defence of peasants and rural women’s rights.
Article 14 of CEDAW was the first international treaty provision to explicitly recognize the rights of rural women. It affirms their right to participate fully in community life and in the elaboration and implementation of development planning at all levels. It also guarantees their ability to organize self-help groups and cooperatives to secure equal access to economic opportunities, and to benefit from agricultural credit and loans, marketing facilities, appropriate technology, and equal treatment in land reform and resettlement schemes. Building on the rights already enshrined in the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR, 1966), Article 14 broadens these protections by tailoring them to the realities of rural women, explicitly recognizing their rights to adequate health care, social security, training and education, and to decent living conditions – including housing, sanitation, electricity, water, transport, and communications.
The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas (UNDROP), adopted after more than 17 years of intense lobby by La Via Campesina and its allies, framed peasants and rural women as individual and collective rights-holders and dedicated a specific article to their rights. Indeed, Article 4, built on CEDAW’s heritage, reaffirmed the rights mentioned in Article 14, deepening rural women’s equal rights to land and natural resources, participation in decision-making and the necessary protection from all types of violence.
Filling the gaps in the recognition of rural women’s unpaid care work in the corpus of international human rights law
The CEDAW argues for a de facto, i.e. substantive equality21 directed at addressing the root causes of (gender) inequality embedded in society. While progressive for its time, CEDAW missed an opportunity in articulating unpaid care work as a form of discrimination, offering a narrow interpretation that limits care work only to ‘sharing of childcare responsibilities.’ It treats maternity-related responsibilities as exceptions rather than the norm, inadvertently reinforcing stereotypes where care becomes a woman’s role. Additionally, Article 11 on the right to work does not acknowledge unpaid care work as a limitation in accessing paid employment, while associating work only with paid, productive opportunities, thereby ignoring unpaid care work as work.22
Like CEDAW, UNDROP too reiterates the emphasis to ensure women’s substantive equality, however, more nuanced feminist claims, like redressing the disproportionate burden of unpaid care work performed by women, were diluted because the UNDROP reinforced the “traditional” language from CEDAW which did not lead to newer inclusions and most notably many States firmly opposed the elaboration of a strong and ambitious language for this article 4.23
However, further examination and interpretation of CEDAW and UNDROP’s provisions allow to recognise and create formidable opportunities for the redressal of the disproportionate impact of unpaid care work has on (rural) women.
In August 2013, the Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, Magdalena Sepúlveda, put forward a report that analysed ‘the relationship between unpaid care and poverty, inequality and women’s human rights.’ While pointing out the gender discriminatory nature of unpaid care work in households, the Special Rapporteur highlighted the relational nature of care work; the rights of caregivers and care receivers are intertwined. She further emphasised that care work is not a matter for the private sphere but one that needs to be assessed by a broader social lens while requiring immediate State intervention. The report highlights that unpaid care work affects several economic, social and cultural rights, especially of the caregivers (mostly women and girls in vulnerable societies). These rights include the right to work, rights at work, the right to education, the right to health, the right to social security, the right to enjoy the benefits of scientific progress (as a result of the lack of basic infrastructure and technology), the right to participation, and the right to rest and leisure.
Soon after, in March 2016, the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women released their General Recommendation No. 34 on the rights of rural women, expanding the provisions of Article 14 of CEDAW, while reiterating the State’s duty to respect, protect and fulfil the rights of rural women. The document recognised the unpaid work burden of rural women and girls due to ‘stereotyped gender roles, intra-household inequality, and lack of infrastructure and services, including with respect to food production and care work.’ The document points out State failure in acknowledging ‘the role of rural women and girls in unpaid work, their contribution to the gross domestic product’ while closely linking it to ‘the macroeconomic root of gender inequality.’24 Amongst other things, the General Recommendation advises State parties to adopt gender-responsive social protections for rural women engaged in unpaid and informal work, put in place programs that reduce the engagement of rural girls in unpaid care work, provide childcare and other such services to alleviate unpaid care work burdens rural women face, and lastly ensure environmentally sound and labour saving technologies be developed in consultation with rural women and should be available and accessible to them, to reduce their burdens.25
The 2013 report by the Special Rapporteur and the General Recommendation No. 34 help establish a foundation, going beyond Article 4 of the UNDROP and Article 14 of the CEDAW, in the reconciliation of the rights of rural women and girls, regarding the unpaid care work they perform.
A progressive recognition of unpaid care work on rural women’s economic, social and cultural rights
Discriminatory gender stereotypes like “male breadwinners” and “women as carers/nurturers,” deem women as second-class citizens belonging in the home. Such stereotypes cause and perpetuate this unequal distribution of work.26 Like the CEDAW, the UNDROP also condemns any kind of discrimination on the grounds of sex, social or other status, while directing States to eliminate conditions that perpetuate discrimination (Article 3). Article 5(a) of the CEDAW advises States to take measures ‘to modify the social and cultural patterns of conduct […] on stereotyped roles for men and women.’
Stereotypical assumptions coupled with chronic time deficits due to intense workloads limit opportunities to participate in decent employment.27 Furthermore, women and girls from rural communities have limited opportunities in the formal labour market, and can be at special risk of violence, sexual exploitation and harassment when they seek employment outside their localities.28 In rural areas, the gender pay gap can be as high as 40 per cent.29 Article 11 of the CEDAW and Article 13 of the UNDROP establish the right to work of rural women. Interestingly, Article 13.2 focuses on the right of children to be protected from work that is likely ‘to interfere with the child’s education […]’ thereby, protecting ‘girls (who) are sometimes taken out of school to undertake unpaid care work.’ 30 Article 10(f) of the CEDAW reestablishes the duty of the State to protect girls/women in such situations. Article 13.2 also gently establishes the right to education of rural girls, which is further expanded in Article 25 of the UNDROP and Article 10 of the CEDAW.
Unpaid care work inhibits a ‘women’s capacity to participate in public life […| in important decision-making processes at the community and national level.’ 31 Article 7 of the CEDAW, along with Article 10 of the UNDROP, reinforces rural women’s right to participate in ‘political and public life’ and in the ‘preparation and implementation of policies, programmes and projects that may affect their lives, land and livelihoods’ respectively.
Rural women and girls are most affected by water scarcity, which is further fuelled by the lack of access to basic infrastructure and services, including water and sanitation facilities. This exacerbates unpaid care work since they must dedicate a huge amount of time, often walking long distances, and sometimes risking violence to fetch water.32 Article 21 of the UNDROP establishes rural people’s right to water and directs States to ‘respect, protect and ensure access to water […] in particular for rural women and girls […]’. ‘Various forms of low-cost and effective technology exist that could ease the burden’ of water collection.33 Article 21.1 of the UNDROP established the right to water supply systems and sanitation facilities, while Article 21.3 directs States to ‘promote appropriate and affordable technologies […] for water collection and storage.’ Tacitly, these statements underline rural women’s right to the benefits of scientific progress since governments rarely make investments in the development of infrastructure that can reduce the intensity and duration of unpaid care work.34
Unpaid care work often forces women into precarious and informal jobs that are insecure, hazardous, poorly paid and not covered by social protection schemes like paid parental leave, unemployment insurance, or pensions.35 Social protection measures can be protective, preventive, promotive and transformative36 to rural women, but poor rural women not only lack access to information but also basic identification documents that could help them access such services.37 The UNDROP directs States to recognise rural peoples’ right to social protection (Article 4.2(c) and Article 22). This is further strengthened by Article 11.1(e) and 11.2 (focused on maternity entitlements) of the CEDAW. The lack of infrastructure and services in rural areas can also mean that unpaid care work can be taxing (physically and emotionally), stressful, and even dangerous. Exposure to disease, risk and challenges from cooking and water collection can compromise the physical and mental well-being of rural women. Additionally, time and income poverty can hinder access to health services, especially in areas that are underserved by health services.38 Article 12 and 14.2(b) of the CEDAW, read along with Article 23 of the UNDROP, validate rural women’s indiscriminatory access to healthcare.
Out of the several rights pointed out by Special Rapporteur Ms. Sepúlveda that are impacted by unpaid care work, there is no mention of the right to rest and leisure, both in the UNDROP and the CEDAW. However, these rights do find a place within the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Article 24) and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (Article 7).
The above exercise of building and expanding on the normative framework of the human rights impact unpaid care work has on rural women and girls, helps pave ‘the way for care being increasingly seen today as a public policy issue as opposed to a private issue, as a social and economic issue, and as critical to thriving and just societies.’39
A slow but growing recognition of rural women’s unpaid care work as a policy issue
It has been only in the last three decades that (unpaid) care work has started becoming a visible policy issue.40
In September 1995, the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action linked the lack of public services to women taking on unpaid work and thereby impacting the economic rights and employment of women. Furthermore, in its objective to eliminate occupational segregation and employment discrimination, it directed governments, employers, employees, trade unions and women’s organisations to ‘address the excessive demands made on some girls for unpaid work in their household and other households.’41
In 2013, the 19th International Conference of Labour Statisticians (ICLS), with its standard-setting agenda in labour statistics, which is hosted by the International Labour Organisation, revised the definition of work to encompass unpaid care work. This definition states that work is ‘any activity performed by persons of any sex and age to produce goods or to provide services for use by others or for own use,’ where one of the five forms of work is ‘own-use production work.’ Own-use production work includes activities performed to produce goods or provide services mainly for the worker’s own final use or household consumption, and include: producing or processing agricultural and other products (including collecting firewood, etc.), fetching water, manufacturing household goods, building or repairing dwellings, household management including purchase and transport of goods, preparing and serving meals, cleaning and maintaining the household, and childcare, elder care and other such responsibilities.42
In 2015, one of the Sustainable Development Goals, target 5.4, aimed to ‘recognize and value unpaid care and domestic work through the provision of public services, infrastructure and social protection policies and the promotion of shared responsibility within the household and the family as nationally appropriate.’43 In August 2023, the General Assembly of the United Nations proclaimed 29 October as the International Day of Care and Support, ‘to raise awareness of the importance of care and support and its key contribution to the achievement of gender equality and the sustainability of our societies and economies…’ In July 2024, the Economic and Social Council adopted a resolution, the first of its kind that was solely focused on care and support, which urged States to create ‘enabling environments for promoting care and support systems for social development and implement all measures necessary to ensure the well-being and rights of care recipients and caregivers…’44
However, despite the growing recognition of the value of (unpaid) care work, and the fact that in the past 20 years, men have never been more involved in family life than they are at present, change comes at a glacial pace. Data from 23 countries reveal that with current progress, closing the gender gap in unpaid care work is likely to take around 210 years (i.e. not until 2228).45 It becomes even more concerning since at all levels, rural women’s rights and needs continue to remain ignored or overlooked in laws, policies, investments, etc.46
Nevertheless, there have been promising signs. In October 2023, the Human Right Council adopted a resolution that expressed ‘concern that the difficulties, intensity and gendered distribution of unpaid care work create and perpetuate inequalities in the enjoyment of human rights… in particular for women and girls in vulnerable situations, women and girls in contexts of poverty, migrant women, rural women, Indigenous women…’ It further stresses ‘the need to adopt measures, with an intersectional approach’ in recognising, reducing and redistributing unpaid care work.47 The resolution resulted in a comprehensive thematic study prepared by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, on the analysis of international human rights standards relevant to care and support. For comprehensive and integrated legislation and policies, one of the five-part conceptual framework is to recognise not only the rights but also the ‘the diversity and intersectionality48 of the identities’ of care providers.49
Introducing intersectionality into a human rights issue offers ‘transformative potential,’ while becoming ‘a tool for equity’ through a contextual programmatic approach. Furthermore, it helps connect ‘international human rights instruments through one lens,’50 facilitating the human rights systems in overcoming its siloed thinking and structures where there specific instruments are used to address for discrimination affecting a group (women, migrant workers, persons with disabilities, etc.), rights categories (civil and political, and economic, social, and cultural), and phenomena (racial discrimination, torture, etc.).51
Intersectionality maps the role that characteristics like race, gender, age, disability, sexual orientation, migrant status, and poverty play in creating a reinforcing web of disadvantages.52 Rural spaces are shaped by policy interventions and omission choices that carry human rights implications, while intersecting with other identities such as gender, race, disability, age and so on, to produce distinct experiences of structural inequality and discrimination.53 Additionally, there is an assumption that rural life mirrors the characteristics of urban life, resulting in a ‘metronormativity’ that fails to address the lived realities of rural life, creating further obstacles and exacerbating violations, 54 herein creating grounds for discrimination, drawn from space and geography. Rurality then becomes an axis of inequality and needs to be added to the canon of intersectional identities. 55
In the past, human rights instruments have not engaged with rurality as an intersecting axis of inequality affecting the rights set out in the foundational human rights treaties. 56 Then there is the fact that rural girls and women are too often invisible57 and continue to ‘face systematic and persistent barriers to the full enjoyment of their human rights.’58 It is here, then, that Article 14 of CEDAW and the UNDROP (especially Article 4) come to our rescue, bringing both rurality and women to the law’s attention, expanding existing human rights norms and practices to explicitly include and apply to rural people.59 These instruments recognise the ‘marginalization that rural women already experience by virtue of the physical geography…’60 offering a sense of spatial justice, to ‘advance frames and solutions that identify and transform structural inequality related to space and geography.’61
It must be noted that UN systems tend to acknowledge rural differences within the context of (i) underdevelopment, deprivation, or limited access to services and resources, and (ii) conditions in developing countries. 62 Plus, progress and challenges reported under Article 14, focus on women’s roles in agriculture, access to services such as health care, education, and job creation and training. 63 Although it is important to address these implications, they are framed in neutral terms and seldom clarify how such dynamics specifically affect rural livelihoods, as we have seen with the lack of recognition of the unpaid care work done by (rural) women and girls.
Conclusion
Still, Article 14 of the CEDAW, the UNDROP, General Recommendations like No. 34, thematic reports such as that by the Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, Human Rights Council resolutions like the one in October 2023 can be used to challenge and prompt law and policy makers to consider the relevance of the rural axis, and the needs of rural women and girls concerning infrastructure and the delivery of key services, such as health care and education. 64 As Hilary Charlesworth points out, the ‘rights discourse offers a recognized vocabulary to frame political and social wrongs.’ 65 By simply introducing the concept of rural as an intersection in policy design, it can prove critical in the implications of the impact it has on individuals, communities and societies.66
In doing so, one can, for example, leverage the ILO’s 5R framework, which recommends that policies should recognise, reduce, and redistribute unpaid care work; reward paid care work; and guarantee representation for care workers through social dialogue and collective bargaining67 to find innovative solutions to addressing rural women’s needs. For example, cash structures can shake-up or undermine, the rigid hierarchy of power and social structures68 as seen in Brazil’s Bolsa Família program, where gender transformation was observed in urban areas with respect to the autonomy of women in making various household decisions. However, in rural areas these effects were either absent or negative, possibly even reinforcing typical gender norms by requiring mothers to fulfil traditional responsibilities while at the same time excluding men from participation.69 In such cases, innovative complementary approaches like engaging religious and community leaders to promote a change in social norms for better recognition, reduction and redistribution of women’s unpaid work, exploring pay-as-you-go model to facilitate access to modern energy and technologies for domestic and productive uses, offering group insurance memberships to rural women networks and cooperatives for reduced premiums, capacity building interventions to improve technological literacy to access financial services, seek relevant information, and find new market opportunities, and so on, may prove to be more successful.70
Ultimately, the normative developments surveyed in this article suggest that international human rights law offers a meaningful repertoire of legal tools through which rural women and girls can articulate claims, contest structural inequalities, and demand accountability. Politically, when these frameworks are invoked through collective organizing, strategic litigation, shadow reporting, and participation in policy-making spaces, they can serve as leverage to bring visibility to unpaid care work, contest its gendered tone, and reframe it as a matter of rights, redistribution, and public responsibility. Advancing such claims requires strengthening legal literacy, supporting rural women’s movements and networks, and fostering alliances across feminist, agrarian, labour, and human rights struggles. In this sense, the effective realization of rural women’s rights in relation to unpaid care work depends not only on the progressive interpretation of international norms, but also on their active appropriation by those most affected, transforming law from a declaratory framework into a site of social and political change.
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2Laura Addati, Umberto Cattaneo, Valeria Esquivel and Isabel Valarino, Care Work and Care Jobs for the Future of Decent Work (Geneva, International Labour Organization, 2018), available at: https://www.ilo.org/sites/default/files/wcmsp5/groups/public/@dgreports/@dcomm/@publ/documents/publication/wcms_633135.pdf (accessed 1 April 2025).
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6Shahrashoub Razavi, “Care and social reproduction: Some reflections on concepts, policies and politics from a development perspective,” in Rawwida Baksh and Wendy Harcourt (eds), The Oxford handbook of transnational feminist movements (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), available at: https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199943494.013.031 (accessed 10 April 2025)
7Prabha Kotiswaran, “Laws of social reproduction,” Annual Review of Law and Social Science, vol. 19 (2023), pp. 145-164, available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1146/annurev-lawsocsci-121922-051047 (accessed 9 April 2025).
8United Nations, Transforming Care Systems in the Context of the Sustainable Development Goals and Our Common Agenda (UN System Policy Paper, 2024).
9Laura Addati, Umberto Cattaneo, Valeria Esquivel and Isabel Valarino, Care work and care jobs for the future of decent work (n 11).
10United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, The World’s Women 2020: Trends and Statistics, chapter 4, p. 353, available at: https://worlds-women-2020-data-undesa.hub.arcgis.com (accessed 1 April 2025).
11International Labour Organization, The Impact of Care Responsibilities on Women’s Labour Force Participation (Geneva, 2024), available at: https://doi.org/10.54394/LPTT5569 (accessed 1 April 2025).
12World Health Organization, International Day for Rural Women (15 October 2024), available at: https://www.who.int/news-room/events/detail/2024/10/15/default-calendar/international-day-for-rural-women (accessed 1 April 2025).
13Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, International Fund for Agricultural Development, and World Food Programme, Rural women and girls 25 years after Beijing: Critical agents of positive change (Rome: FAO, IFAD, and WFP, 2020), available at: https://openknowledge.fao.org/items/7337a107-fd66-4b8e-9026-408e52d29f7d (accessed 1 April 2025). Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women, General recommendation No. 34 (2016) on the rights of rural women, CEDAW/C/GC/34 (7 March 2016), available at: https://digitallibrary.un.org/record/835897?ln=en&v=pdf (accessed 10 April 2025).
14Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, International Fund for Agricultural Development, and World Food Programme, Rural women and girls 25 years after Beijing (n 2).
15Flavia Grassi, Josefine Landberg, and Sophia Huyer, Running out of time: The reduction of women’s work burden in agricultural production (Rome: FAO, 2015), available at: https://www.fao.org/3/a-i4741e.pdf (accessed 4 April 2025).
16 Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, Addressing Women’s Work Burden: Fact Sheet (Rome, 2016), available at: http://www.fao.org/3/a-i5586e.pdf (accessed 10 April 2025) ; Flavia Grassi, Josefine Landberg and Sophia Huyer, Running Out of Time: The Reduction of Women’s Work Burden in Agricultural Production (n 5).
17Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, Addressing Women’s Work Burden: Fact Sheet (Rome, 2016); citing World Bank, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, and International Fund for Agricultural Development, Gender in Agriculture Sourcebook (Washington, D.C., 2009).
18 Laura Addati, Umberto Cattaneo, Valeria Esquivel and Isabel Valarino, Care Work and Care Jobs for the Future of Decent Work (n 11).
19Time poverty is broadly understood as the lack of time needed for individuals to meet their basic requirements for rest and leisure, also known as discretionary time, owing to an excess of paid work and unpaid care and domestic work. This understanding draws on the work of Vickery (1977), as cited in: United Nations, World Survey on the Role of Women in Development 2019: Why Addressing Women’s Income and Time Poverty Matters for Sustainable Development (New York, United Nations, 2020), ST/ESA/371, available at: https://www.unwomen.org/en/digital-library/publications/2019/06/world-survey-on-the-role-of-women-in-development-2019 (accessed 10 April 2025).
20United Nations, World survey on the role of women in development (n 18).
21The Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women states that a purely formal legal or programmatic approach is insufficient to guarantee women identical treatment to men. Biological, social and culturally constructed differences must be taken into account, and non-identical treatment may be required to overcome the underrepresentation of women and to ensure the redistribution of resources and power. An enabling environment is essential to achieve equality of results and to transform systems grounded in historically determined male paradigms of power and life patterns. From: Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women, General Recommendation No. 25 on Article 4, Paragraph 1, of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, on Temporary Special Measures (2004), paras. 8–10, available at: https://www.un.org/womenwatch/daw/cedaw/recommendations/General%20recommendation%2025%20(English).pdf (accessed 11 July 2025).
22Ana Belen Sobrino Gonzalez, CEDAW: Why Care about Equality? Exploring the Principle of Equality and Non-Discrimination in the Context of Women’s Unpaid Care and Domestic Work in Development Discourse and Practice (Oslo, University of Oslo, 2016), available at: https://www.duo.uio.no/bitstream/handle/10852/51389/HUMR5200_thesis_uio_Candidate_8021.pdf (accessed 1 April 2025).
23Priscilla Claeys and Joanna Bourke Martignoni, Women are peasants too: Gender equality and the UN Declaration on the Rights of Peasants (n 7).
24Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women, General recommendation No. 34, CEDAW/C/GC/34 (n 3).
25Ibid.
26UN General Assembly, Report of the Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, A/68/293 (n 23).
27Ibid.
28Ibid.
Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women, General recommendation No. 34, CEDAW/C/GC/34 (n 3).
29International Labour Organization, Rural Women at Work: Bridging the Gaps (Geneva: ILO, 6 March 2018), available at: https://www.ilo.org/publications/rural-women-work-bridging-gaps (accessed 10 April 2025).
30UN General Assembly, Report of the Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, A/68/293 (n 23).
31Ibid.
32UN General Assembly, Report of the Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, A/68/293 (n 23) ; Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women, General recommendation No. 34, CEDAW/C/GC/34 (n 3).
33UN General Assembly, Report of the Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, A/68/293 (n 23).
34Ibid, para. 55.
35UN General Assembly, Report of the Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, A/68/293 (n 23); Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women, General recommendation No. 34, CEDAW/C/GC/34 (n 3).
36Stephen Devereux and Rachel Sabates-Wheeler, Transformative social protection, IDS Working Paper No. 232 (Brighton: Institute of Development Studies, 2004), as cited in Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, Empowering rural women through social protection, Rural Transformations – Technical Papers Series No. 2 (Rome: FAO, 2015), p. 5.
37UN WomenWatch, Rural women – overview: Social protection, available at: https://www.un.org/womenwatch/feature/ruralwomen/overview-social-protection.html (accessed 10 April 2025).
38UN General Assembly, Report of the Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, A/68/293 (n 23).
39 United Nations, Transforming Care Systems in the Context of the Sustainable Development Goals and Our Common Agenda, UN System Policy Paper (New York, 2024), p. 29, available at: https://unsdg.un.org/sites/default/files/2024-07/FINAL_UN%20System%20Care%20Policy%20Paper_24June2024.pdf (accessed 1 June 2025).
40While policy discourse typically addresses care work in its entirety, this document focuses specifically on unpaid care work. Care work includes both paid and unpaid activities that “encompass direct care for people (physical, emotional, psychological and developmental) as well as indirect care (e.g. household tasks, including collecting water and firewood, travelling and transporting), taking place within and outside the home.” Definition adapted from: United Nations, Transforming Care Systems, p. 6.
41United Nations, Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, A/CONF.177/20 (1995), adopted by General Assembly resolution 50/142, available at: https://archive.unescwa.org/sites/www.unescwa.org/files/u1281/bdpfa_e.pdf (accessed 11 June 2025).
42International Labour Organization, Resolution concerning statistics of work, employment and labour underutilization, ICLS/19/2013/R.1 (adopted 11 October 2013), available at: https://www.ilo.org/global/statistics-and-databases/standards-and-guidelines/resolutions-adopted-by-international-conferences-of-labour-statisticians/WCMS_230304/lang–en/index.htm (accessed 11 June 2025).
43 United Nations, Goal 5: Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls, Sustainable Development Goals, available at: https://sdgs.un.org/goals/goal5#targets_and_indicators (accessed 11 June 2025).
44United Nations Economic and Social Council, Promoting Care and Support Systems for Social Development, resolution E/RES/2024/4 (2024), available at: https://digitallibrary.un.org/record/4054737?v=pdf (accessed 16 July 2025).
45Laura Addati, Umberto Cattaneo, Valeria Esquivel and Isabel Valarino, Care work and care jobs for the future of decent work (n 11).
46Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women, General recommendation No. 34, CEDAW/C/GC/34 (n 3).
47United Nations Human Rights Council, The Centrality of Care and Support from a Human Rights Perspective, Resolution A/HRC/RES/54/6 (11 October 2023), available at: https://docs.un.org/en/A/HRC/RES/54/6 (accessed 16 July 2025).
48Intersectionality is a concept and theoretical framework that facilitates recognition of the complex ways in which social identities overlap and, in negative scenarios, can create compounding experiences of discrimination and concurrent forms of oppression. United Nations Network on Racial Discrimination and Protection of Minorities, Guidance Note on Intersectionality, Racial Discrimination and Protection of Minorities (Geneva: ILO, 2023), available at: https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/documents/issues/minorities/30th-anniversary/2022-09-22/GuidanceNoteonIntersectionality.pdf (accessed 16 July 2025).
49United Nations Human Rights Council, Human Rights Dimension of Care and Support: Report of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, A/HRC/58/43 (30 January 2025), available at: https://docs.un.org/en/A/HRC/58/43 (accessed 16 July 2025).
50UN Women, Intersectionality resource guide and toolkit (New York: UN Women, 2021), available at: https://www.unwomen.org/sites/default/files/2022-01/Intersectionality-resource-guide-and-toolkit-en.pdf (accessed 16 July 2025).
51Allison J. Petrozziello, “Intersectionality as method for human rights research,” Journal of Human Rights 24, no. 2 (2025): 182-198, https://doi.org/10.1080/14754835.2025.2477493 (accessed 16 July 2025).
52Meghan Campbell, “The distance between us: Sexual and reproductive health rights of rural women and girls,” in Shreya Atreya and Peter Dunne (eds), Intersectionality and human rights law (Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2020), pp. 112-130, available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3587464 (accessed 16 July 2025).
53 Amanda Lyons, “Rurality as an intersecting axis of inequality in the work of the UN treaty bodies,” Washington and Lee Law Review 79 (2022): 1125-1148, available at: https://scholarlycommons.law.wlu.edu/wlulr/vol79/iss3/8 (accessed 16 July 2025).
54Meghan Campbell, The distance between us (n 53).
55Amanda Lyons, Rurality as an intersecting axis of inequality (n 54); Meghan Campbell, The distance between us (n 53).
56Ibid.
57Meghan Campbell, The distance between us (n 53).
58Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women, General recommendation No. 34, CEDAW/C/GC/34 (n 3).
59Lisa R. Pruitt, “Deconstructing CEDAW’s Article 14: Naming and explaining rural difference,” William & Mary Journal of Women and the Law 17 (2011), available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1770054; Amanda Lyons, Rurality as an intersecting axis of inequality (n 54).
60Ibid (n 60).
61Amanda Lyons, Rurality as an intersecting axis of inequality (n 54).
62Ibid.
63Lisa R. Pruitt, Deconstructing CEDAW’s Article 14 (n 60).
64Ibid.
65Hilary Charlesworth, “What are ‘Women’s International Human Rights’?” in Human Rights of Women: National and International Perspectives, p. 58 (1994), as cited in Lisa R. Pruitt, Deconstructing CEDAW’s Article 14 (n 60), p. 347.
66Sarah Redshaw, Cate Thomas, Nathan Kerrigan, Branka Krivokapic-Skoko, and Susan Flynn, “Rurality and intersectionality: a literature review,” Equality, Diversity and Inclusion: An International Journal 44, no. 9 (2025): 208-226, available at: https://doi.org/10.1108/EDI-10-2024-0482 (accessed 16 July 2025).
67Laura Addati, Umberto Cattaneo, Valeria Esquivel, and Isabel Valarino, Care work and care jobs for the future of decent work (n 11).
68 Francesca Bastagli, Jessica Hagen-Zanker, Luke Harman, Valentina Barca, Georgina Sturge, and Tanja Schmidt, with Luca Pellerano, Cash transfers: What does the evidence say? A rigorous review of programme impact and of the role of design and implementation features (London: Overseas Development Institute, 2016), available at: https://odi.org/en/publications/cash-transfers-what-does-the-evidence-say-a-rigorous-review-of-programme-impact-and-of-the-role-of-design-and-implementation-features (accessed 16 July 2025).
69Francesca Bastagli, Jessica Hagen-Zanker, Luke Harman, Valentina Barca, Georgina Sturge, and Tanja Schmidt, Cash transfers: What does the evidence say? (n 69); United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women (UN Women), The effect of cash-based interventions on gender outcomes in development and humanitarian settings (New York: UN Women, 2019), available at: https://www.unwomen.org/en/digital-library/publications/2019/12/effect-of-cash-based-interventions (accessed 16 July 2025).
70 United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women (UN Women), Innovative Solutions to Recognize, Reduce and Redistribute the Unpaid Care Work of Rural Women in Senegal (2023), available at: https://africa.unwomen.org/en/digital-library/publications/2023/06/innovative-solutions-to-recognize-reduce-and-redistribute-the-unpaid-care-work-of-rural-women-in-senegal (accessed 16 July 2025)
