CHAPTER EIGHT

EMPOWERING WOMEN

The Challenges:

Kenya is characterised by great gender disparities and inequalities. The population of women is 51.4% and yet only 6% have titles to their land. The current constitution indirectly discriminates against women, particularly in respect to access to resources. Neither do women enjoy equal citizenship rights with men. They cannot obtain an identity card or passport without either their father’s or husband’s permission.

Women cannot inherit land and cannot access credit; they are unable to improve their economic situation. They bear the brunt and consequences of growing insecurity in the country, and cases of rape and defiling young girls are on the rise. Women are grossly underrepresented in national and local decision-making institutions which remain maledominated.

Women are disadvantaged politically, socially, culturally and economically. There can be no sustainable or equitable development or poverty eradication unless discrimination against women is eliminated and unless gender-based inequality and injustice are proactively removed.

Our Commitments:

We will enact a new constitution based on the Bomas Draft which prohibits discrimination on the basis of gender.

We recognize that women have special health problems which place them at a higher level of risk. We will ensure that all health programmes are gender sensitive and effective reproductive health services remain a priority. We will encourage and support training programmes for birth attendants.

We will develop gender sensitive natural resource management and environmental policies and programmes. Women are hardest hit by the effects of environmental mismanagement and degradation as their role and tasks in agriculture, animal husbandry and in the household make them managers and users of natural resources. We will support projects that promote the utilisation of alternative sources of energy as substitutes for wood fuel.

Your ODM Government will:

• Intensify efforts and actions to redress the existing persistent gender disparities in Kenya which hamper the full integration of women in our society.

• Ensure more girls enrol and remain in schools and introduce gender mainstreaming in curricula at all levels of education.

• Revise all oppressive practices, statutes and customary laws that perpetuate gender discrimination.

• Advocate the elimination of all forms of violence against women and girls and ensure that our criminal justice system is tough on the perpetrators of such heinous crimes.

• Improve women’s access throughout their life cycle to appropriate, affordable and quality healthcare, information and services.

• Encourage the development and promotion of environmentally friendly and affordable technologies which would reduce women’s burdens.

• Encourage projects that promote the utilisation of alternative sources of energy as substitutes for fuel wood.

• Consolidate and expand credit facilities and provide more business advisory services and skills training to women so they can run viable and sustainable businesses.

• Take affirmative action and other means to ensure a minimum 30% representation of women in Parliament, Local Government, Foreign Service and all other areas of government and decision-making institutions. This would be a start, and there will be no glass ceilings on the aspirations of Kenyan women as we work progressively towards realising a 50:50 gender ratio in all public bodies.

• Address the issue of the rights of women concerning land. Land rights currently allow men to dispose of family land without consulting women.

• Ensure that we ratify the International Conventions on Women’s Rights and domesticate them into national policies and laws.

• Secure inheritance rights for unmarried daughters.

• Secure the legal rights of spouses to matrimonial property.

• Increase adult literacy rates among women.