On every trip to India, one of the things I am never tired of doing is reintroducing Nepal to India, a neighbor with deep historical, cultural, political, and economic ties, but with prevailing challenges in understanding each other.
Nepal’s recent Time Use Survey (2019) revealed that women of working age spend 5.9 hours daily on domestic work versus just 2.25 hours for men. Strategic investments in care infrastructure, drawing from lessons from the region, could free up women’s time for formal employment while simultaneously creating new jobs in the care services sector – thereby boosting Nepal’s female labor force participation rate from its current level of 28.7% in 2023.