Full length article Counting unpaid work in Kenya: Gender and age profiles of hours worked and imputed wage incomes Moses K. Muriithi, Reuben G. Mutegi, Germano Mwabu ⇑ University of Nairobi, Kenya article info Article history: Available online xxxx Keywords: Unpaid work Imputed wage incomes NTTA Third-party criterion Kenya abstract The paper first presents profiles of unpaid work by age and gender before turning to profiles of their mon- etary values. We value unpaid work using a novel data set on hourly wages from the Kenya Gazette on salaries of workers covered by minimum wages mandated by the Government in 2015 (Republic of Kenya, 2015). We count unpaid work performed by men and women at home, on the farm, and within household enterprises. In particular, focus is on unpaid work that is also typically performed away from home, such as child care. We value unpaid work using the delegation or third party criterion (Reid, 1934; Donehower, 2014). We find that men work longer hours in household enterprises and earn more than women, but the reverse is true on the farm. The imputed wage incomes from unpaid work on the farm vary by gender and age over the life course, with men’s imputed wage-income profiles dominating women’s at older ages. General policy implications of the findings are briefly discussed. Ó 2017 Published by Elsevier B.V. Introduction Margaret Reid starts her seminal book on the ‘economics of household production’ by noting that although the ‘‘household is our most important institution” (Reid, 1934, p. v), little is known about the value of the goods and services produced by the house- hold or the value of the effort employed to that end. Her book iden- tifies three key functions that a household performs: reproduction, harmonization of social relationships, and meeting the daily needs of its members. Reid observes that satisfaction of daily needs of household members is the essence of household production, and is accomplished through employment of unpaid work. The defini- tion of unpaid work and its valuation as done here is in the methodology section. The present paper falls within the intergenerational economy literature recently summarized by Lee and Mason (2011). Unpaid work received its first global attention at a World Summit for Social Development (United Nations, 1995) and later found its place in the UN Sustainable Development Goals which replaced the Millennium Development Goals in September 2015. Within the stand-alone Goal 5 on gender equality, the subsection 5.4 rec- ognizes the need to count and value unpaid work, especially the work performed by women. The emphasis on unpaid work is motivated by the need to correct the current pro-male bias in the market economy, despite the large unrecorded, non-market contri- butions made by women outside of the activities that are captured by the system of national accounts (SNA). It is also important to note, as in Waring (1999), that the national income accounts give a misleading picture of the size of the economy because the unpaid work, especially by women is ignored. According to Hoskyns and Rai (2007) and Abertini et al. (2007), the unpaid work of women at home and in the community is the glue that keeps households and societies together. In Kenya and elsewhere in Africa, women are generally restricted to carrying out unpaid work within the home despite the fact that African governments recognize human capital formation is enhanced by performance of market activities Blackden and Wodon (2006). The current labor force participation in Kenya gives a picture that suggests that women participation is at a lower rate than men’s Suda (2002). This picture changes drastically when women’s non-market work is counted. Women in rural Kenya, for instance, spend on average 23 per cent more time in crop activities than do men. Apart from what they do in agriculture, Kenyan women in rural areas spend about 40 per cent of their time collecting water, averaging, about 3–5.25 h per day (AfDB, 2007). Githinji (2000) http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jeoa.2017.04.004 2212-828X/Ó 2017 Published by Elsevier B.V. ⇑ Corresponding author. E-mail address: gmwabu@gmail.com (G. Mwabu). The Journal of the Economics of Ageing xxx (2017) xxx–xxx Contents lists available at ScienceDirect The Journal of the Economics of Ageing journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jeoa Please cite this article in press as: Muriithi, M.K., et al.. The Journal of the Economics of Ageing (2017), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jeoa.2017.04.004