A/HRC/22/50 wages are low (or payment is made in the form of food items), only those in genuine need, who have run out of other options, may seek to enter these programmes, which are therefore self-targeting. Public works programmes may serve to create physical infrastructure (such as irrigation schemes, wells or rural roads) or to deliver environmental services (for instance hillside terracing or other landscape arrangements to facilitate the capture of rain water or the planting of trees) that contribute to long-term development aims. 27. Many public works schemes set aside a quota for women. India‟s Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), introduced in 2005 and which benefited 52.5 million households in 2009-2010, provides for one third of the employment to be allocated to women.35 The Rural Maintenance Programme in Bangladesh goes even further; it is an all-women programme, successfully employing over 50,000 rural women to maintain 60,000 miles of earthen roads.36 While access to employment in such programmes can favour the empowerment of women, paying greater attention to the gender impacts could significantly increase their benefits to women: (a) Women may choose not to participate in such programmes because of the heavy demands it would impose on them and the difficulties they may have in reconciling the work with their responsibilities in the "care" economy. A system of quotas may be ineffective to address this. The difficulties women may face to participate in public works programmes should therefore be taken into account: their responsibilities in the "care" economy should be recognized and accommodation measures should be adopted. Furthermore, work schedules should take into account the specific time constraints faced by women, and institutionalized child care should be implemented to attract more women. Where child care at the work site is under the responsibility of women who are labourconstrained, because of age or disability, this can further increase the opportunities the programme offers to women. Thus, the MGNREGA includes a provision that "in the event that there are at least five children under the age of six at the worksite, one of the female workers shall be deputed to look after them and paid the same wage as other NREGA workers." However, the implementation of this clause remains highly uneven as most women joining the programme are discouraged from bringing their children to work, and a social audit of the implementation of MGNREGA revealed that 70 per cent of the women interviewed had no access to child-care facilities on the worksite, while 65 per cent were not aware of this provision in the Act.37 (b) Similar self-exclusion may occur where the work proposed under the public works programmes is considered too demanding physically (more suitable for men) or violates certain cultural norms as to which tasks are suitable for women. The challenge in this case would be to ensure that the division of tasks on the programme takes into account the specific constraints faced by women, without reinforcing gender stereotypes. This may be done by adopting a phased approach. During a first phase, some work may be designated as "light" or "moderate" with priority for women, and some work as "heavy" and assigned to men; and certain tasks that are traditionally performed by women could be included in public works programmes, for instance preparing food in community kitchens or maintaining community vegetable gardens. At the same time, it should be ensured that 35 36 37 12 In fact, the participation rate of women exceeded that minimum every year, reaching 48 per cent in 2009-2010 at national level (ILO-UNDP, “Sharing Innovative Experiences. Successful Social Protection Floor Experiences”, (Global South-South Development Academy, 2011), p. 276). S. Devereux and C. Solomon, “Employment creation programmes: The international experience. Issues in Employment and Poverty”, Discussion Paper 24 (Geneva, ILO, 2006), p. 31. S. Narayanan, "Employment guarantee, women‟s work and childcare", Economic Political Weekly, vol. 43, No. 9 (2008), pp. 10-12.