It seems as if failure to plan carefully further burdens the adolescent with disadvantage through time poverty. Time poverty is created by the competing demands of the household economy with its numerous tasks which challenge time management.
Blackden and Wodon (2006) are of the view that time presents many challenges for the education of the poor, with a high amount of tasks to be done by adolescents at home. This causes challenges in careful planning for adolescents: left with little time for sleep compromises their alertness during the day, causes students greater school week sleep lag and significantly disadvantages them through decreased alertness and increased sleepiness during the day (New York State United Teachers [NYSUT] 1998). I have not been able to obtain literature on the impact of the disadvantage of children’s time allocation in Zimbabwe, and all I could find was a very limited attempt in the available literature. Most of the available literature in parts of Africa looks at children in general and not adolescents (Blackden & Wodon, 2006).
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One of the factors relating to time disadvantage is the long distances that students travel to school in some parts of Zimbabwe, which is confirmed as a big challenge, according to Kit (2012), who adds that, in some cases in the remote parts of Zimbabwe, children are forced to seek residence near the school to avoid spending more time travelling to school. Spinks (2002) is of the view that this causes students to become despondent, get poor marks or become too tired to participate with enthusiasm actively in school teams because they are having too little sleep if they get home late and have to wake up early for the long journey to school.
Besides long distances, in a Kenyan study, Yamano and Jayne (2004) stated that diseases in the family negatively affect primary school girls’ attendance due to the expectation that they share in the burden of caregiving. Family sickness diverts attention from food production, employment, education and care of other household members. In Malawi, studies established that HIV causes time poverty because of the time requirements in caring for the sick and burying the dead, causing a reduction in the time available for other productive activities (Shah, 2001). Poverty is a function of time as well as money (Harvey & Taylor, 2000). HIV creates time shortages through committing children to, among other commitments, sickness, care and funerals, for example, in Zambia, where affected people are said to spend as many as 952 hours a year for personal sickness and even more time for the care of the sick and attending funerals (Cornia & Zagonari, 2002). It is possible for these factors to interplay, reinforce each other and worsen the plight of children: some produce time poverty, others income poverty, and some produce both time and income poverty (Burchardt, 2008).
These activities are allocated along gender lines roughly corresponding to the rights and obligations between males and females in a household, as argued by Blackden and Wodon (2006), who confirm that some gender asymmetry creates different patterns of time use and tasks between men on the one hand and women and children on the other. This is differentiated by gender and the inefficiency and inequality it represents between the sexes (Ibid.). The result is that girls have competing roles simultaneously and are required to balance these competing claims on limited time for each of their roles and still aim to have all tasks done (Ibid.).
In a family set-up, Zimbabwean girls are expected to process food, provide water and firewood, and care for the elderly and the HIV sick (Ibid.). They add that most of these women- and children-gendered tasks consume more time for girls than they do for boys, as is confirmed in Ghana where, of the 6 million hours spent fetching household water, men only spent 2 million
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hours, while women (and children) doubled that at 4 million. In comparison, fetching firewood consumes 2.2 million hours of women’s time, while men only spend 0.8 million hours (Ibid.). In an HIV era, that burden is made worse because HIV increases the burden of other domestic activities, such as housework, shopping and transportation (Akintola, 2005).
The tasks that come with HIV/AIDS require adolescents to act as heads of households with the burden of time management in order to meet subsistence- and income-generating activities (Serra, 2009). The same adolescents also need time for sleep for memory consolidation, for vital optimal performance in learning tasks, just like the body needs an adequate nutritional status, ambient temperature, a certain level of stress, blood oxygenation, and other variables, which all clearly affect the ability to learn (Spinks, 2002).
It is possible that gender differences compound time poverty against girls because scarcity means difficult choices have to be met. Harsh choices of the use of time are at the core of the interrelationship between the visible market and invisible household economies, given the simultaneous competition, that have to be made, according to Blackden and Wodon (2006). Sometime time usage is indispensable, as argued by Harvey and Taylor (2000) and a certain minimum number of household time overheads may always have to be met for the survival of the family. Such considerations result in Zambian children from many very poor households being kept out of school because of the opportunity cost considerations in favour of boys (Rau, 2002).
Generally, the gender bias in which girls work increasingly longer hours than boys starts at school age 7 to 14 (Tsukada & Silva, 2009), and girls experience less and less time available for homework and self-study, as they have to do more of the unpaid domestic chores. These domestic chores and increased responsibilities of care compromise the girls’ capacity to accumulate human capital, possibly leading to the foreclosure of their potential for higher income (Tsukada & Silva, 2009). Evidence of the impact of this bias against girls is illustrated by the overall girl performance in public examinations where, due to the probable shouldering of more responsibilities as Zimbabwean poverty continues to worsen, they in turn performed worse than boys in the national secondary public examinations between 2006 and 2009, as can be seen in Table 2.1.
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Table 2.1: O-Level National Pass Rate by Gender 2006–2009
Year Gender Total Number of Candidates
Number of Candidates who Passed Five or More Subjects
National Pass Rate 2006 Female 74,363 12,902 17.35 Male 79,866 18,345 22.97 Total 154,229 31,247 20.16 2007 Female 85,291 10,354 12.14 Male 93,983 15,319 16.30 Total 179,274 25,673 14.32 2008 Female 71,450 8,910 12.47 Male 71,390 11,722 16.42 Total 142,840 20,632 14.44 2009 Female 44,209 7,472 16.90 Male 42,992 9,381 21.82 Total 87,201 16,853 19.33
(Adapted from Gaidzanwa & Chung, 2008: 3)
Cultural practices are still traceable in the way that girls are treated by some families (Kit (2012), who states that there is in some cultures the belief that girls need less schooling because their place is to stay in the home. This is further confirmed by Hallfors, Cho, Rusakaniko, Iritani, Mapfumo and Halpern (2011), who state that some guardians pressured orphan girls aged 12 to 15 years to marry, which helps the family’s savings and protection during old age (Tsukada & Silva, 2009).
Whether married or single, women and very young children spend extended times preparing meals in places where there is no electricity (Blackden & Wodon, 2006) or where its supply is erratic, such as in Chitungwiza and most of Zimbabwe. Women and children in these conditions are short of time to stay in healthier environments, and this overexposure to unhealthy environments causes high levels of acute respiratory infection due to exposure to air pollutants (Green, 2005).
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Since most of these tasks are skewed against girl children, it may be concluded that time constraints during girls’ productive ages hampers their ability to increase their expected permanent future income (Tsukada & Silva, 2009). This is in the sense that girls’ educational benefit is potentially compromised through time shortages and, therefore, poverty impedes individuals’ ability to expand their capabilities through education and skills development enough to enhance economic returns in the marketplace (Blackden & Wodon, 2006). Thus, it may be concluded that time and household income poverty affects children the most. Burchardt (2008: 37) confirms that the other factors that make poverty severe among children are: a combination of the above in conjunction with being a girl/woman aged 16 to 29; not having a partner; more children in the household; younger children in the household; and having lower, or no, educational qualifications.