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APPENDIX
1. UGANDA PROJECT SUMMARY
Measuring Care Labor in AIDS-Affected Households
Proposal for Pilot Summer Program, Uganda, 2009
Kiaran Honderich
Economics Department, Williams College We propose to bring a group of students from Williams College to Uganda
for 6 weeks during June and July 2008, to do joint field research with a
group of students from the Department of Women and Gender Studies at
Makerere University. We will train all of the students in how to observe
and measure care labor inside households, then place them inside
households in pairs (one Williams student with one Makerere) to spend
hours sitting and documenting what they see. The first group of
households will be in a village, and the second group in an urban slum.
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The social benefits of this research will be substantial. Care labor for
AIDS orphans and those who are sick and dying is a heavy burden, borne
primarily by women and girls, invisible and largely unsupported. It is
easily ignored by policymakers because it exists outside the market
economy; leaving the burden of this labor to be picked up by women does
not appear as a cost in anyone’s budget. But for girls it may mean being
pulled out of school at a young age, and for women it means less time
for subsistence farming or income generation, which leaves them at
heightened risk for hunger, and more economically dependent on men
(which in turn can make them more vulnerable to infection with HIV.)
Without good data, though, it is hard to make a case for taking this
issue more seriously. We will train students in the methods developed by
feminist economists to measure unpaid care labor so they can gather such
data.
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The educational benefits for all of the students will also be
substantial. They will receive methodological training and experience in
fieldwork, as well as learning about each other’s cultures from being
trained together and doing collaborative work. Where appropriate, the
students will be encouraged to tie their fieldwork in to other research
projects of their own, such as honors theses. The Ugandan students will
all be using the research for their honors theses.
This research is envisioned as a possible multi-year project, with
the hope that in future years we will raise funding to try different
forms of support of care labor, and measure their impact within
households and the community economy. For 2009 we propose a pilot
version, with 5 Williams students and 5 Makerere students, gathering
data in either one or two communities. The project will be run by Kiaran
Honderich of Williams College and Consolata Kabonesa, head of the
Department of Women and Gender Studies at Makerere University, in
partnership with a local NGO, and advised by a committee of Ugandan AIDS
activists, academics and policymakers
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