Kenya: Disadvantage, Depravity And Poverty Wear Female Faces

from All Africa

The East African Standard (Nairobi)

Aungo Bw'onderi
Nairobi

It is common knowledge that Kenya is a country of extreme disparities: Ethnic, economic, regional and gender.

Apart from Brazil, Kenya has the world's greatest gap between the rich and the poor. On average, 58 per cent of those living beneath the poverty line are women. Poverty, depravity and disadvantage wear predominantly female faces. The relationship between poverty and gender is central to understanding development, poverty eradication and provision of education in rural areas.

However, there is an apparent mismatch between Government policies and programmes on sustainable development and the needs and challenges of rural communities where women are at the margin of development and community empowerment. Most programmes addressing poverty view women as passive recipients of Government largesse and philanthropy; victims of forces they neither generate nor control, and ignore the significant constraints that they face as a group due to their subordination in society.

While causes of poverty are critically engendered, policies continue to be based on conceptualisations that persistently alienate gender dimensions. Subsequent redress plans and programmes consistently and predictably fail to improve the lives of households, let alone eradicate poverty. Rural women are perpetually disadvantaged and constrained in ways never given due attention during policy formulation and programme planning. Studies continue to attest that single-stranded or blanket planning in most sectors often misdiagnoses key priorities and dynamics in poverty eradication.

Government policies pay little attention to rural women and the hurdles preventing them from greater participation in productive activities and poverty eradication programmes. Poverty-focused rural development planning needs to be designed from the knowledge of opportunities and constraints placed on women by location and socio-cultural inequalities. For example, women work longer hours than men without commensurate returns, engage more in domestic labour, have lower chances of escaping poverty and are perceived negatively, especially widows and single women.

Poor rural women also have disabling burdens such as illiteracy and constrained access to economic resources, leading to fatalistic dependency that ensures susceptibility to poverty. Evidently, conventional poverty measures and tools of analyses have become poor predictors of gender inequalities. In their place, the levels of wellbeing and deprivation in a community's economic life are better indicators and planning aids. Since these are more sensitive to the ways gender determines poverty levels and responses, they can also form a more credible basis of eradication initiatives.

The Jomtien Conference of 1990 drew attention to the gender gap in education in regard to access. The Beijing Platform for Action laid emphasis on investments in formal and non-formal education and training of girls and women as a means of achieving development and economic growth.