Fuel Wood Collection and Gender Time Poverty: Implications for Development Policy

IntroductionIgnored until recently, gender issues are now seen to be directly relevant to many of the most important variables in development equation such as education, health, productivity of labour, mobilization of capital, enterprises, and ultimately economic growth. Discussion of gender issues recently became an important addition to the development debate after Ester Boserup's landmark publication 'Women's Role in Economic Development' in 1970. The emergence of gender as an important aspect in the analysis of development process is mainly because of two reasons. Firstly, the strengthening of the feminist movements in response to the widespread discrimination against women in developing countries, and, secondly, the availability and reliability of gender disaggregated data in developing countries (Anthony et al. 2009).A serious issue in this regard, which is particularly very common in poor countries, is the increasing proportion of women poverty. Women poverty has many dimensions. Recently, the most important of these is women time poverty which can be defined the unavailability of time for productive work. Most of the time of rural women is spent in non-productive chores (including reproductive as well as community works) such as raring children, caring elderly and sick people, cooking and serving, cleaning, fetching water, collection of fire wood from the surrounding hills, and participation in social festivities. This time could otherwise be utilized in productive works. This paper attempts to assess the gender time poverty due to fuel wood collection and its implication on women economic poverty.In many developing countries fuel wood collection and use is primarily responsibility of women who allocate ample time to this activity. Kumar and Hotchkiss (2003) estimated that women in the hilly areas of Nepal spent 2.5 h ours per day on fuel collection. Similarly, Karekezi et al. (2005) recorded that in Botswana, the average time spent on fuel wood collection was about 3.3 hours. This research found that women sometimes spent up to 6 hours per day on collecting fuel wood.One of the reasons why women spent more time on fuel wood collection is the large quantity of fuel wood required for a household consumption. The fuel wood is used in traditional cooking stoves having less thermal efficiency and more wood consumption. One of the adaptation strategies is to introduce improved cooking stoves to minimize the fuel wood consumption. Previous research shows that the combustion efficiency increases with improved cooking stove which not only reduces cooking time but also minimizes the fuel wood demand of a household (Berrueta et al. 2008; Johnson et al. 2008). This not only reduces household cash outlays for fuel wood, but also reduces time spent by women for collecting fuel wood (Garcia-Frapolli et al. 2010). A similar study by WHO (2007) highlighted the social, economic, environmental, and health benefits of improved cooking stoves called 'Plancha' in Guatemala. Beside other benefits, the use of improved cooking stoves also substantially reduced women's time during cooking and fuel wood collection.Objective of the StudyThis study is conducted with the aim to assess gender time poverty and its implication for the development policy. The specific objective of the study is to determine the time women spent on collecting fuel wood from the nearby woods.Research MethodologyThe study was conducted in two villages, namely Barkaley and Chail, in the Swat District - Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan. Most of the population in these villages belong to either low or lower middle income class. People in the area live on hills covered with tress and vegetation. The main sources of livelihood are agriculture, labor, biomass selling, etc. People depend on biomass for their domestic energy purposes which they collect from the surrounding forest. The socioeconomic characteristics, demographic structures, topographic conditions, land tenure system, livelihood structures, and living conditions are almost the same in all neighbouring villages of Swat. …