The Challenge

Unpaid care work in India is significantly imbalanced: 65.6% of women’s work is unpaid compared to 11.7% of men’s.

Unpaid care work is rooted in prevalent patriarchal social norms as the tasks perceived as being naturally more suited to women, who are seen as more nurturing, altruistic, and loving. To support UNDP India to foster change in families and communities toward a more equal sharing of unpaid care work between men and women, it is essential to integrate SBC.

The consequences of this unequal distribution are numerous:

• For women: lack of opportunities for education or skill enhancement, impedes entry into the labour market, limits access to existing and potential collective action or means of obtaining social security.

• For families: limits household income.

• For society: unpaid care work represents about 35% of India’s GDP.

MAGENTA partnered with UNDP to design and implement a Behavioural Insights Framework to inform their programmatic design, development and dissemination.

The Objective

Unpaid care work in India is a deep-rooted issue requiring extensive behavioural work. To tackle this issue, MAGENTA designed a Behavioural Insights Framework to support UNDP India and key external stakeholders including government officials and civil society organisations to foster change in the division of household and unpaid care work.

The objectives of this project was to build the capacity of UNDP India in social and behaviour change with a focus on behavioural insights by creating a framework that is easy to use and broadly applicable to any situation, but without losing the complexity of behavioural science.

MAGENTA also wanted the framework to be relevant to the needs of field staff, which is why we made the process participatory by having the framework tested and approved at validation workshops, and by incorporating the feedback we received.

The Framework, intended for UNDP India and unpaid care work, was rolled out by the UNDP Southeast Asia Regional Office and globally through the UNDP’s Accelerator Lab.

Social and Behavioural Insights

To enable a better understanding of the framework, MAGENTA facilitated validation workshops with relevant stakeholders and UNDP staff. These sessions allowed us to integrate feedback to meet the expectations of practitioners in their project. Finally, we organised a train-ing-of-trainers series of workshops to better empower UNDP globally to embed SBC elements, approaches and tools in their work on unpaid care work in India and on thematic priorities globally.

This framework has been designed in such a way that it can be applied to any theme and any context

What we did

1. Inception Phase: MAGENTA conducted a thorough desk review and seven stakeholder consultations to identify behavioural barriers in boys and men that contribute to the disproportionate share of unpaid care work for women and girls.

   • Desk review

   • Stakeholder consultations

   • Inception Report

   • Behavioural insights framework

2. Stakeholder Validation & Knowledge Management: MAGENTA designed and developed a bespoke Behavioural Insights Framework to support UNDP India to foster change in the division of household and unpaid care work. Through two validation workshops with internal UNDP staff and external stakeholders , the framework was validated at an institutional level.

   • Validation Workshops

   • Update the Behavioural Insights Framework

3. ToT Workshop: MAGENTA designed and conducted two training-of-rainers (ToT) workshops for UNDP staff and other stakeholders on using behavioral insight approaches and tools to address drivers of inequalities including unpaid care work in the context of India to more than 30 participants globally.

   • ToT Workshop

Impact

We produced 1 framework and trained 30 people from the UNDP Southeast Asia Regional Office and , from 12 different countries from Guatemala to Indonesia, during 2 validation workshops and 1 TOT.

UNDP colleagues can now integrate this evidence-based approach using the Behavioural Insights Framework to ensure SBC best-practice approaches are embedded in their programme design, development and delivery, thus more effectively enhacing the impact of their work in the advocacy for a better recognition and division of unpaid care work.