The Double Burden of Conditionality
How social protection can overwork the women it targets
Some studies from around the world have shown how targeting mothers for conditional cash transfer have positive impacts on different outcomes, however, rigid conditions to receive the program risk exacerbating unpaid care burdens on women. While targeted cash transfers like Indonesia’s PKH provide financial relief to low-income families, treating mothers as default agents of change risks a subtle trade-off: easing monetary poverty while deepening women’s time poverty. To truly empower women, social protection must reconsider program designs.
Imagine getting home after a long, exhausting day of informal work and a rain-drenched commute, earning well below minimum wage. The moment you step inside, your partner asks you to prepare dinner, wash the dishes, and care for your crying toddler. Finally, your partner reminds you to attend tomorrow morning’s government health check-up and community meeting with your toddler to keep your household’s cash assistance active.
For many low-income mothers, this is the daily reality of the double burden: a cycle where societal expectations and state welfare conditions combine to tax a woman’s most limited resource: her time. This scene captures the paradox of modern social assistance. Social assistance programs may provide essential financial relief, but by relying on mothers as the default administrative managers of family welfare, they raise questions of increasing income poverty for severe time poverty.
Criscrossing the globe from countries in the Western to the Eastern hemisphere, as of 2025, ILO modelled estimated less than half (sitting at 48 percent) of women participate in the labor force, compared to men, whose participation sits at seventy three percent. Average global earnings in 2018 revealed a stark imbalance: women received just 54 cents for every dollar paid to men. Yet, women around the globe also shoulder the burden of three times more unpaid care and domestic work than men, with women in low and middle income countries spending even more time than those in high income countries, with variations based on income.
To bridge this gap, governments and NGOs globally deliver various programs directly to women, including cash transfers, microcredit, savings accounts, with underlying assumptions that handing women capital would translate to an increase in their income, empower them, and give them control of the funds used.
Indonesia is one of them. By mid-2025, the Indonesian government had announced that they had allocated Rp10trillion in the form of the country’s flagship conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs, Bantuan Pangan nontunai (BPNT) and Program Keluarga Harapan (PKH). The latter implicitly targets mothers as primary program recipients, with the goal of improving family health and education outcomes, including improvement of children’s low birth weight. Randomized evaluation of the PKH program demonstrated how specific administrative designs, such as self-targeting, helped reach more of the very poorest households in the bottom five percent.
However, over thirty randomized evaluations and quasi-experimental studies in low and middle income countries have shown how access to financial services or resources does not automatically translate to increasing women’s economic empowerment. Other factors often came into play and restricted women recipients’ ability to use the funds and make the decisions themselves, ranging from gender norms to intra-household dynamics. Evidence from different contexts have shown that there remains beliefs and norms where men are perceived as the primary decision-makers.
Recommendations and future research
While there is still limited evidence regarding the intersection of cash transfers and gender outcomes, some studies have suggested that cash-based programs/interventions with careful, gender-sensitive design consideration can result in positive outcomes for women’s empowerment.
Policymakers must consider time poverty during the initial theory of change mapping of a social protection program. Conditional cash transfers often treat mothers as the main point of contact for family welfare, and thus putting more expectations on them regarding compliance, travel to community centers, and attending programs, rather than individual economic actors with limited time. When administrative and effort burdens fall entirely or mostly on women beneficiaries, cash transfers may risk reinforcing traditional gender roles to be the ones responsible for the children’s health and education outcomes, and limit women’s capacity to pursue paid labor, education, or even rest.
Prior to even designing the program, one would need to trace back to the needs assessment. In this stage, several questions can be further delved into by analyzing datasets, conducting pilots, and in-depth qualitative work, including:
Whose needs are these?
If the need is to improve children’s health and education outcomes, then whose responsibility is it? Is it solely the mother’s?
If we are operating under the assumption that mothers spend more time with the children, what tradeoffs would come with having mothers as the main beneficiaries of the program?
Are we potentially depriving mothers off their free time that they could spend participating in the labor force or even for rest?
Are we taking any, if not most, responsibilities off the fathers?
What tradeoffs would come with involving fathers as being responsible too for their children’s health and education outcomes?
Policymakers may also benefit from understanding protective delivery mechanisms better, especially in delivering social protection programs. While there are different socioeconomic contexts and needs, there is also some existing evidence depending on the program. For example, evidence from India has shown that transferring wage payments from a government-led work program directly to women’s bank accounts, combined with training the beneficiaries on the use of the accounts, increased the likelihood that women worked. With this kind of design, women may have more control and flexibility on the use of the funds transferred. However, it also requires digital transfers infrastructure.
Regardless, many mechanisms tackle different parts of complex gender norms surrounding cash transfers. Social protection programs can benefit from further research that intentionally aims to explore gender norms, power relations, and redistribution of household duties.
AI statement: I used AI to 1) help paraphrase certain sentences for better flow, 2) check grammar, and 3) help find sources that may be relevant but ended up using sources I found on my own.
