to young unmarried girls who get abandoned by putative partners soon after they get pregnant or after delivery, a situation of increasing frequency in our cities and towns.
The private nature of reproductive labour and subsistence agriculture, as compared to the public nature of formal sector employment and export agriculture where men dominate, contributes to the invisibility of women's work. This invisibility has led to a cultural bias that keeps women in a position of inferiority. National statistics and surveys do not reflect the real contribution of women to the economy. It is understandably difficult to measure the value of goods and services that are never exchanged for money. But part of the problem also lies with the bias inherent in current methods of data collection, which reflects the dominant male bias in our societies in the definitions of work, economic activity or place of employment. Making women count will require more sophisticated investigatory methods and tools to analyse the true place of women in the economy and the value of their productive and reproductive roles. Let us look more closely at the value of women's unpaid work.
Misperceptions about reproductive labour and 'housework' are common throughout the developed and developing worlds. Housewives are assumed to work fewer hours than men in formal employment, and to work more slowly and less strenuously than many workers. Most people believe that housework has little productive value, yet no family could live as well or cheaply as it does without the unpaid services of a housewife. Purchasing cleaning, cooking and child-care services can be very costly. Replacing home-grown food with purchased food can be both costly and in many cases less nutritious. John Kenneth Galbraith characterized the housewife as a 'crypto-servant' to both her family and the economy because her economic contribution was un-recognized.20 Box 2.3 of the 1990 UNDP Human Development Report entitled "Women count - but are not counted" is worth noting in this respect.
A number of researchers have tried to put an economic value on women's household work - estimated as high as one-third of the global annual economic production.21 Two main methods have been developed. The first attempts to calculate the 'replacement cost' if the goods and services had to be purchased on the market rather than being provided for no cost by the housewife. Using this method, it was estimated that in 1979 women in the US provided, on average, $14,500 worth of cleaning, cooking and childcare services each year.22 American figures are likely to be significantly lower than comparable figures for Africa and other developing areas, where women are engaged in more subsistence agriculture and the provision of more primary health care services to family and community members than is the case in the industrialized countries.
A good example of a 'replacement cost' calculation can be found in studies of the economic value of breastfeeding. A 1988 study by the Geneva Infant Feeding Association (GIFA) estimates that in a country with a high population growth rate like Indonesia, mothers produce more than one billion litres of milk annually. They estimated the market value of this milk to be more than US $500 million, greater than that of the country's tin and coffee production. In Ghana, where there is a high breastfeeding rate, it is suggested that a loss of only one per cent of the national breastmilk production would cost about US $1 million for milk powder substitutes. In the Ivory Coast, GIFA estimates that breastfeeding saves the average family US $600 for each child's first two years. Globally, if all the mothers of the 120 million babies born in 1979 had breastfed, they, would have produced 30 billion litres of milk worth US $15 billion.23 Not included in these figures are the additional costs of equipment and fuel needed for bottle-feeding over breastfeeding.
The real value of breastmilk, however, is in its health-promoting and birth-spacing effects, which are much more difficult to calculate than the co