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The norm, especially here in Africa, is that as women we do most of this unpaid care work at home, which is our work place, this leaves us with almost no time to carry out our paid work at our workplaces. To earn an income, for example in our organisation Envirojewels, we weave baskets, you are paid for every basket that you weave and is completed, spending more time doing unpaid care work at home means you will not earn any income as you have no baskets to sell.
Having little or no income as women home-based workers, is a recipe for domestic violence, as most women are now dependant so much on their partners for financial support, yet you find that they are also in a dire financial situation due to the lockdown, this dependency results into domestic violence as home demands are not meant as expected.
Women home-based workers are not mentioned among essential workers to be prioritized for both Covid-19 testing and vaccination. We see women workers from the formal sector prioritized for Covid-19 testing and vaccination as workers. When we visited a health facility in our community for vaccination where we were asked to show whether we were among the essential workers mentioned that is the, teachers, nurses or army staff, hence we were referred to another time after the vaccination of the essential workers, which leaves women home- based workers at a very risky position of escalation of the disease.
When our supply chains were broken, women home-based workers lost income. At the same time prices for basic needs increased, which has brought about food shortages in our homes and accessing relief packages provided by governments was a very slow process where it managed to reach.
Without our daily income, our communication and information access has been hampered as both airtime and affordable data to continue communicating among members in our networks is now a challenge, we used to share skills via social media, but now it’s difficult.
Money that had been saved from cash rounds in our groups, saving schemes were withdrawn to cater for daily livelihoods. Most of the savings from the previous year had already been used to pay school fees . Members’ abilities to continue saving at this time is difficult and some groups have stopped saving completely.
When the lockdown was enforced many women home-based workers turned to subsistence agriculture as an alternative work, when it came to selling their produce, there was a big issue of low price fluctuations of the produce they had for sale, so most of the agricultural produce, especially maize, was decaying in stores.
We are using the lockdown period to pass on basic skills like farming, renewable energy in the form of briquettes.
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