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It is widely recognized that women in developing countries have dual roles as generators of household income and as primary caregivers to their children. Many policies directed at reducing poverty or malnutrition involve one or the other of these roles. Programs to reduce child malnutrition, for example, typically target mothers as caregivers. However, because of the time constraints women face, there are potential conflicts between women's different activities about which policy makers are rarely informed. Nutrition interventions have not usually considered the barriers to participation in such programs facing mothers who, either by choice or necessity, have entered the labour force (Leslie, 1988; Engle, 1994). Similarly, policies directed at improving female employment opportunities typically ignore women's important role in household activities related to children's healthy development.  In this paper we address a potentially important implication of women's multiple roles and the time constraints they face: that female labour force participation, by reducing the time available for household activities related to child development, may place young children at nutritional risk.

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We estimate a discrete choice model of primary schooling and simulate policy alternatives for rural Madagascar. Among school quality factors, the results highlight the negative impacts on schooling demand of poor facility quality and the use of multigrade teaching (several grades being taught simultaneously by one teacher) in public schools. Simulations indicate the feasibility of reducing multigrade in public schools by adding teachers and classrooms, a policy that would lead to modest improvements in overall enrollments and would disproportionately benefit poor children. Given much higher price elasticities for poorer households, raising school fees to cover some of the additional costs would strongly counteract these favorable distributional outcomes. An alternative policy of consolidation of primary schools combined with multigrade reduction or other quality improvements is likely to be ineffective because of the strongly negative impact of distance to school. JEL: I2, O15

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This paper reviews several decades of empirical research on the effects of women's work on investments in children's human capital-their nutrition and schooling-in developing countries. No clear relationship between women's work and nutrition emerges from a large body of studies examining this issue, but this is to be expected given the complexity of the relationship and the wide variation in methodological approaches. However, specific factors, such as quality of substitute care and age of the child, condition the relationship and point to areas where policy can intervene to prevent negative nutritional outcomes or enhance positive outcomes of maternal work. Less research has been done on the subject of women's work and children's schooling, but there is evidence that there can be negative effects on girl's education because daughters are often obliged to substitute in the home for mothers who work. The paper considers a range of policies (including, in particular, childcare) that can reduce the potential conflicts, or increase the complementarities, between women's need or desire to work and their children's well-being. Also discussed are trends in developing economies and in the global economy that are affecting women's work and its relation to children's welfare, as well as affecting the ability of governments to intervene to ease the domestic constraints on women.3