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Desta CG

There is ample evidence on this from maternal work and child care literature (e.g., Samman, Presler-Marshall and Jones,
2016 and the references therein).
Second, work conditions are more flexible for rural economies than for urban economies (Kim and Aassve, 2006).
Farms are not that much far from the house and the mother can flexibly use her time taking care of her child at home and
working in the nearby farm plot. Even where farm plots are away from home, the mother can still manage to work. It is
common, in Ethiopia for example, to see mothers doing the farming activities holding children on their backs or placing
them in a tree shade beside the farm with another young child to look after the youngest child. This has also been well
confirmed by information from qualitative observation and interview with some sample households.
A twenty-eight year old woman was holding her five-month daughter on her back when I met her cutting fodder from
her maize farm. Her responses to questions I raised in the interview illustrate the argument above:
My husband is sowing shimbra (a local name for chickpeas) in another farm. My daughter is
sleeping now on my back, but she will begin crying eventually as she feels hot in the sun.
Sometimes, she develops fever at night. I know this is bad for her, but I have to do this because there
is no option. My younger sister, whom I brought to help with the household activities following my
delivery is there working in the farm with my husband removing the weeds. I could have brought
my other two children with me here to look after my daughter in the tree shade, but they are in the
house watching for sito [some raw food stuffs such as grains, cereals, etc. put to dry in the sun
before further processing] from bird pests.
Third, young children in many cases contribute to the family labor by taking care of the domestic chores. The domestic
labor contribution of young children is also well documented in the literature (Aghajanian, 1979; Boserup, 1985;
Caldwell and Caldwell, 1987; Cho, 2006). According to Cho (2006), children contribute to household economy by
replacing the mother’s activity at home. Boserup (1985) and Caldwell and Caldwell (1987) argue that in addition to their
labor input, children in sub-Saharan Africa demand little child care, allowing the mother to spend her time on work. In
the case of Ethiopia, Solomon and Kimmel (2009) also note that young children often contribute to domestic chores,
which allows the mother to work away from home. They also note that Ethiopian mothers are unlikely to leave their jobs
in the face of high unemployment and underemployment rates in the country. The quantitative data for the present study
shows that members engaged in non-productive work for the household increased the work participation rate of the
mother (see Appendix B). This result has also been well confirmed by qualitative observation and interview with
children and parents. The qualitative data revealed that children were able to work for the household both as non-school
children, pre-school children and school children. Some school-age children had their parents refused to send them to
school, and so work for them; some children were too young for schooling, but can do some kind of work for their
family (as in the young children’s taking care of the sito in the house in the quotation above), and some others use their
non-school hours for family work, such as the mornings, evenings, and the other half, non-school shift of the school day.
In addition, many rural parents make their children be absent from school for several days, especially when there is a
sign of untimely rain coming during periods of crop harvest.
Equally inconsistent with theory and most available evidence, despite the lack of statistical significance, is the more
adult children’s negative contribution to rural maternal work participation. In Ethiopia, it is often common to see older
mothers working only a few hours a day or absenting themselves from farm work at all and staying home doing domestic
chores compared to younger mothers. Results from the quantitative data show that, contrary to the positive maternal
work participation effect of members engaged in non-productive work, members engaged in productive work decreased
the mother’s work participation. It can be argued that this is probably the result of work substitutability between the
mother and other members of the household including children (especially of adult ones). This appears to have been also
reinforced by other context-specific circumstances such as land tenure and the subsistence nature of farming coupled
with poverty. In Ethiopia, land is owned by the state since 1974 and farmers have utilization rights of the land they have
held. There were periodic land redistribution schemes during the Dergue government (1974–1991). The existing
government had also redistributed land in 1995/96 and has certified the farmers as a security to their land utilization
right. There has not been any redistribution carried out thereafter. As a result, male children were implicitly obliged to
continue to work on parents’ land, mainly as sharecroppers, even having been married and have own family. Their
marriage also increases the household’s labor force thus encouraging the mother to stay home doing the household
chores. Even when married children might in some cases work on their own farm, or migrate to cities where they engage
in non-farm activities, they might have to spend some days helping on their poor parents’ farms, or hiring some daily
labor for them. The rural to urban migration effect of restrictions in youth access to land is well documented in Bezu and
Holden (2014). On the other hand, some better-off parents were able to hire daily labor by their own.
Evidence from the qualitative interview and observation is much more revealing. A forty-one year old woman having
five live children out of six demonstrates this as follows:
36 International Journal of Population Studies | 2017, Volume 3, Issue 2