Abstract

Estimates of GDP, the main aggregate of national accounts, do not consider domestic work, mainly performed by women in both urban and rural areas. To account for this part of the work, necessary for the community and affecting its effective level of well-being, Morocco has produced a household satellite account related to the unpaid domestic work of households which falls outside the production boundary of national accounts.
The objective of the household satellite account is to value unpaid domestic work, thus will make visible the contribution of women to the creation of national wealth, and to estimate an "extended" GDP which would be a more adequate measure of the well-being and standard of living of households.
The results of the satellite account show that domestic work within households creates the equivalent of 19,4% of Moroccan GDP and that the majority of this additional "wealth" (85%) is created by women. However, it should be noted that women in rural areas contribute only 45% of women's domestic value added.
Indeed, rural women spend less time in domestic activities than their urban counterparts, but they devote considerable time to unpaid agricultural activities on family farms.
moreover, the domestic and professional spheres of rural women are so closely intertwined that the distinction between professional and domestic work is not relevant. Especially since these two forms of work have similar characteristics: they are free, unrewarding and vectors of inequality.
Indeed, rural women are stuck between domestic work and unpaid agricultural work, often in livestock activities which represents a continuation of the domestic work of women in rural areas.
This paper has three main objectives:
- answer the question: why this gap between women's contribution to unpaid domestic work in rural and urban areas?
- propose a valuation of the unpaid work carried out by women on family farms, based on the working hours of self-employed rural women from the national employment survey and using an average of the relevant wages.
- produce an exhaustive estimate of the unpaid work carried out by women in the Moroccan countryside.