Article: " Childcare During Working Hours: Challenges and Solutions in the Gulf" (العناية بالأطفال أثناء الدوام: تحديات وحلول )

نُشر في صحيفة الحياة
English version below

يعتبر تعزيز مساهمة الإناث في القوة العاملة أحد أهم أهداف الإستراتيجيات الاقتصادية للدول الخليجية، وذلك لتحقيق العدالة والمساواة بين الذكور والإناث، وأيضاً للاستفادة من كل الموارد البشرية المتوافرة، بخاصة في فترة الانكماش الاقتصادي.ـ

المزيد

Increasing female labor force participation is considered one of the most important goals of the Gulf countries’ economic strategies, in the pursuit of social equality and justice for the two sexes, and also as a way of maximally deploying the available human resources, especially in a period of economic recession.

Increasing female labor force participation is considered one of the most important goals of the Gulf countries’ economic strategies, in the pursuit of social equality and justice for the two sexes, and also as a way of maximally deploying the available human resources, especially in a period of economic recession.
Today, the Gulf countries are traversing ground previously covered by the western world, as countries such as the USA and Sweden exhibit female labor force participation close to male levels. In contrast, in the GCC countries, female participation is less than half of male participation.
 
However, Islam and Gulf cultural norms together present an additional challenge that is absent in secular western countries seeking to increase female labor force participation. This challenge requires new solutions, tailored to the conditions of the Arabian Gulf.
 
Female employment is usually associated with the problem of arranging childcare for infants during working hours, as working wives are typically part of families where the husband also works. Households where both parents work are a growing phenomenon, as the prevailing difficulties in the global economy are driving families toward augmenting their income in any way possible. Working married couples are presented with three options.
 
First, charging another family member, such as a grandparent, uncle, or older sibling, with childcare.
 
Second, employing someone from outside the family to take care of the children inside the home, such as a professional nanny who visits during working hours, or a live-in domestic helper.
 
Third, using specialized childcare centers.
 
The second option is affected by the following considerations relating to Islam and Gulf culture.
 
When someone from outside the family enters the house to look after children, if that person is a man, then that decreases the comfort level of the women living in the house, including the children’s mother. The presence of that man may be incompatible with the family’s religious principles, and with Gulf cultural norms, especially during the times of day when there are no men from the family at home.
 
Alternatively, if the extrafamilial childcarer is a woman, then that might contradict her religious principles, and the region’s cultural norms, because she will be working in the home of a strange family, and in the presence of men in the home who are not from her family.
 
In secular countries, some women may express reservations about working in the homes of other families, or about allowing non-family males to work in their homes, primarily due to safety concerns. However, in general, there are no religious- or culture-based impediments.
 
As a result of these religious and cultural restrictions in the Gulf countries, families rely on family help, or upon private childcare facilities. Alternatively, they employ people from outside the family to work in the house, with the condition that the childcarer be a foreign woman—potentially a non-Muslim—such as a domestic helper from the Philippines or India, so that the religious and cultural restrictions do not apply.
 
With this in mind, Gulf governments have facilitated the employment of foreigners by streamlining the necessary paperwork, in contrast to western countries, where unskilled foreigners rarely qualify for work permits.
 
Recently, the decision calculus has begun to change, for three reasons.
 
First, falling oil prices have decreased the purchasing power of Gulf families, and therefore their derived demand for domestic helpers.
 
Second, the developing countries that export labor have experienced sustained economic growth, which diminishes their citizens’ need to work outside their home countries. The result is an increase in the cost of domestic helpers, especially those with higher skills and qualifications, which typically constitute the preferred group from which to select childcarers.
 
Third, the current generation of Gulf grandparents features many working females, who entered the labor force 30 years ago, and continue to work, and who are therefore unable to help their children in caring for their grandchildren during working hours, while the grandfathers come from a generation where they lack the necessary childcare skills.
 
Thus, with a diminishing opportunity to make use of the first (charging a family member with childcaring responsibilities) and second (employing someone from outside the family to care for children in the home) options in the Gulf, it is worth examining how to improve the availability of the third option (using specialized childcare facilities) as it does not violate religious or Gulf cultural norms.
 
In particular, there is a need for a substantive inquiry based on genuine efforts to reach out to stakeholders, such as families where both parents work, grandparents who help with childcare, the specialists working in childcare facilities, those overseeing the educational content of courses in childcare offered by universities and institutes, private sector representatives, the government entities in charge of labor market regulation, and others.
 
Is there a way of decreasing the costs of pre-school? How can parents’ trust in such centers be increases? Should larger offices be forced to provide childcare facilities, as occurs in some countries? What are the best ways of monitoring the employees at preschools, and for protecting the children they serve from violence and negligence? How can one attract elite members of the workforce to work in childcare? What are the successful experiments in other countries that should be imported? These are some of the questions that the inquiry must answer, in an effort to propose a new government policy that serves the interests of Gulf citizens, and allows Gulf families to realize their economic ambitions.