Women empowerment and gender equality have been in Kenya's policymaking mainstream for a long time.
As a matter of fact, it is one of the Millennium Development Goals Kenya aims to achieve. This has been backed up by forming initiatives that are implemented to ensure it becomes a reality including Women Enterprises Funds and Public Procurement Preference and Reservations for Women, Youths and Persons Living with Disabilities. These are to ensure that the socio-economic empowerment of women is realised.
Despite the set-aside plans and initiatives, Kenya still faces a wide gap between the genders which emanates from a strong patriarchal system among most communities as well as traditions and societal norms of the past.
This explains why Kenya and other parts of the globe need not only celebrate women but also empower them.
Most of the time, women experience misrepresentation in public sectors and politics, unequal distribution of resources especially in rural areas as well as suffer gender-based violence where after separation in a marriage, the woman is left with the responsibility of looking after the children.
This has spiked the number of single mothers.
Coming up with policies to protect women from exploitation by some rules set by society, we achieve a balance as women have a level playing field to show their abilities and compete with their male counterparts.
Empowering women to know their rights will enable them to fight for them.
Studies show that empowering women and making them in charge of our public and other private resources will result in at least a 50 per cent increase in the national economic growth of any nation.
Such measures would include campaigns against such activities as Female Genital Mutilation that has been a threat to the pastoralist communities and has kept girls from school and forced them into marriages, in most cases to much older members of society.
Maseno University
