Skip to content

Busara

Busara Main Logo
  • Publications
  • Our People
  • What’s Happening
  • Publications
  • Our People
  • What’s Happening
More About Busara
  • Project Report

Shifting narratives to value unpaid and informal work in Kenya

Download PDF

Alina Ojha, Nosariemen Nosakhare, Janeth Amwoma, Morgan Kabeer & Blandina Bobson

  • August 14, 2024
  • 3:40 pm
Reframing Narratives_2

SECTOR

Social Inclusion

PROJECT TYPE

Research report

DOI

doi.org/10.21201/2024.000021

Location

Kenya

BEHAVIORAL THEME

Informal Work
OVERVIEW

Unpaid Care and Domestic Work (UCDW) and Paid Domestic Work (PDW) are essential to societal wellbeing. However, these activities often carry negative perceptions, attitudes and beliefs when performed by men and boys. As a result, women and girls typically shoulder the primary responsibility for performing UCDW. Similarly, society often undervalues PDW by perceiving it as low-skilled work, as demonstrated through low remuneration and unfair employment practices. The narratives many cultures embrace concerning UCDW and PDW partly explain why these essential activities frequently fall on women and girls, and why society often undervalues PDW.

THEMATIC AREAS

This report documents a collaborative research project between Busara Center for Behavioral Economics and Oxfam to investigate existing narratives on UCDW and PDW in Kenya, and test potentially transformative narratives that could shift societal attitudes. Overall, the quantitative results suggest that the impact of different frames varies considerably, depending on the context and nature of decisions. While gain frames may influence attitudes and perceptions more effectively, loss frames might motivate actions with monetary incentives more successfully.

RELATED CONTENT

Stress and Temporal Discounting: Do Domains Matter?

August 2, 2020

How Soon Is Now? Evidence of Present Bias from Convex Time Budget Experiments

August 2, 2020

Measuring Self-Efficacy, Executive Function and Temporal Discounting in Kenya

August 2, 2020

Risky Choices and Solidarity: Why Experimental Design Matters

August 2, 2020
1 2 3 … 5 Next »
  • Home
  • Publications
  • Our people
  • What’s happening
  • Home
  • Publications
  • Our people
  • What’s happening
Facebook Linkedin Twitter Instagram
  • More About Busara
  • Join us
  • More About Busara
  • Join us
We are proud to be a member of

© 2025 Busara | Privacy Policy

Scroll to Top
Manage Cookies

To provide the best experiences, we use technologies like cookies to store and/or access device information. 

Functional Always active
The technical storage or access is strictly necessary for the legitimate purpose of enabling the use of a specific service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user, or for the sole purpose of carrying out the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network.
Preferences
The technical storage or access is necessary for the legitimate purpose of storing preferences that are not requested by the subscriber or user.
Statistics
The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for statistical purposes. The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for anonymous statistical purposes. Without a subpoena, voluntary compliance on the part of your Internet Service Provider, or additional records from a third party, information stored or retrieved for this purpose alone cannot usually be used to identify you.
Marketing
The technical storage or access is required to create user profiles to send advertising, or to track the user on a website or across several websites for similar marketing purposes.
Manage options Manage services Manage {vendor_count} vendors Read more about these purposes
View preferences
{title} {title} {title}