Costing a Maternity Leave Cash Transfer to Support Breastfeeding Among Informally Employed Mexican Women

Abstract

Background: Investing in maternity protection for working women is an important social equity mechanism. Addressing the maternity leave needs of women employed in the informal sector economy should be a priority as more than half of women in Latin America, South Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa are employed in this sector. Objective: To develop a costing methodology framework to assess the financial feasibility, at the national level, of implementing a maternity cash transfer for informally employed women. Methods: A World Bank costing methodology was adapted for estimating the financial need to establish a maternity cash transfer benefit. The methodology estimates the cash transfer's unitary cost, the incremental coverage of the policy in terms of time, the weighted population to be covered, and the administrative costs. The 6-step methodology uses employment and sociodemographic data that are available in many countries through employment and demographic surveys and the population census. The methodology was tested with data for Mexico assuming different cash transfer unitary costs and the benefit's time coverage. Results: The methodological framework estimated that the annual financial needs of setting up a maternity cash transfer for informally working women in Mexico ranges between US$87 million and US$280 million. Conclusions: A pragmatic methodology for assessing the costs of maternity cash transfer for informally employed women was developed. In the case of Mexico, the maternity cash transfer for women in the informal sector is financially feasible.

The annual cost of providing paid maternity leave in the informal sector in Indonesia 

“…Using this cost, the percent of our administrative cost as compared to the total cost falls between 5 -36% (Table 3), depending on the UC used in the calculation. Our administrative cost per woman and its share out of the total cost is higher than that of Mexico, but comparable to the study conducted in the Philippines [31,59].…”

“…The costing methodology used is the adapted version of the World Bank methodology by Vilar-Compte et al [31], following pre-set steps to estimate costs using nationally secondary data. The following formula was used in the study: We used the 2018 Indonesian National Socio-Economic Survey (SUSENAS) [24], an annual nationally representative survey able to provide population level estimates using provided weights.…”

“…Previous studies in Indonesia have shown that the annual cost of not breastfeeding is large, ranging from 0.14% to 0.90% of Indonesia's GDP in 2018 [4][5][6] and outweighs the cost of paid maternity leave within the formal sector [30]. As women in low and middle income countries (including Indonesia) are more likely to work in the informal sector [31] and mostly are uncovered by maternity leave policies [32], paid maternity leave policies within the informal sector would potentially result in larger benefits both economically and non-economically than within the formal sector. Unfortunately, providing paid maternity leave to informal workers is still a challenge globally [32].…”

“…This study aims to estimate the cost of providing a maternity leave cash transfer (MCT) for WRA who work informally in Indonesia. Such studies are lacking in Indonesia and in other low-and middleincome countries all over the globe [31,38]. Furthermore, the few studies available have analyzed cash transfers targeting several outcomes (e.g.…”

Association Between Breastfeeding and Child Stunting in Mexico

“…improve the training of healthcare providers to increase the quality of services provided for mothers and their children; enable food systems to provide healthy and innocuous foods; and improve or provide safe WASH systems where not yet available [10,12,20,29,31,40,45,46]. Pre-and post-natal efforts should also focus on households with moderate to severe food insecurity and in families with a higher number of children aged <5 years.…”