The Guatemala Community Day Care Program: an example of effective urban programming

Urban programming, Child care, Community Daycare Centers Program, Childcare and work, Gender,

Migrant remittances and the web of family obligations: Ongoing support among spatially extended kin in North-east Thailand, 1984–94

Exchanges of money, goods, and assistance among family/kin members are influenced by the intertwined lives of individuals and their family/kin. As people pass through the young adulthood years, acquiring obligations as spouses and parents, and migrating in search of economic opportunities, tensions can arise over existing obligations. Using rich longitudinal data from Northeast Thailand, we examined the role of family networks (origin and destination) on migrants’ exchanges with family/kin. Our approach overcame many shortcomings of earlier studies, allowing us to 'see' the family social network arrayed in a broader network. We show that intra-family exchanges are influenced by marital status, the presence of children, having parents in the origin household, and having siblings depart from it. The results are stable across sensitivity tests that systematically include or exclude various familial links. And reports provided by origin households on migrant remittances are consistent with reports from migrants themselves

Resource allocation and empowerment of women in rural Bangladesh

The bargaining power of men and women crucially shapes the resource allocation decisions households make (Quisumbing and de la Brière 2000). Husbands and wives often use their bargaining power to express different priorities about how resources should be allocated. Understanding these differences and their effects is critical if policymakers are to improve livelihoods. Increasing the bargaining power of one gender group rather than another can mean the difference between policy failure and policy success.PRIFPRI1; GenderFCN

Mothers\u27 work and child care: Findings from the urban slums of Guatemala City

High rates of urbanization and increasing levels of female participation in the labor force are beginning to increase the demand for nonparental child care in Latin America. Shifts in the structure of urban production toward manufacturing and industry mean that employment opportunities for women will increasingly occur in settings that are not compatible with child care. Rural to urban migration often means moving away from extended family, which decreases access to informal child care givers. Does child care provision have an impact on mothers\u27 work? This study attempts to answer this question by analyzing the labor force participation, hours worked, and child care arrangements of mothers in the urban slums of Guatemala City. The study is based on data from a random sample of 1,300 mothers with preschool children residing in one colonia of Guatemala City in 1999, designed and collected as part of an impact evaluation of the Hogares Comunitarios government-sponsored day care program. It is different from previous studies on child care choice that take mothers\u27 labor force participation as a given. Although those who demand child care are, for the most part, working mothers, if a mother\u27s work status is influenced by the availability of child care, any examination of the determinants and consequences of child care choice should not be conditioned upon her work status. This unique survey was designed so that this difficult issue could be addressed. Information on a mother\u27s current situation, her family background, her current household, her children, and her community was solicited from all mothers, both working and nonworking, so that care choices could be examined in conjunction with a mother\u27s labor force activities

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1 This paper is not a formal publication of the World Bank. Rather, it presents preliminary results of analysis. Citation and the use of such a paper should take account of its provisional character. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this paper are entirely those of the authors and should not be attributed in any manner to the World Bank, to its affiliated organizations or to members of its Board of Directors or the countries that they represent