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Women´s Health and Rights
Background
Kenya is undergoing a period of rapid change in its gender relations. Throughout the country, values and practices which undervalue, limit and endanger women are being questioned and women’s voices are being heard in the media like never before. In spite of this, Kenya remains a laggard in women’s empowerment in the region. While neighbouring Rwanda has become the only country in the world in which women outnumber men in government (including the legislature and the cabinet), women in Kenya account for a dismal 4 percent of its parliamentary seats.
Education
In the previous section we discussed how steep the dropout rate of students in Kenya is during times of hardship, or when entering secondary and tertiary education. What is often missed by commentators is the fact that girls are the first to go, due to the pervasive belief that educating women is less important than men, as women will simply be married off anyway. This has meant that while basic literacy for women has reached 80% and an even higher figure among the young generation, their representation in vocational and higher learning has been minimal. Joyce Oneko, one of our partner community leaders and a personal inspiration, is living evidence of the importance of reversing this trend. In her youth, she was given the opportunity to attend university through a scholarship provided by an NGO, which allowed her to study law. At the time, she was one of only a few women at the university, and the only one in her faculty. After two decades of work as a corporate lawyer, she decided to return to her village and provide the same opportunity for other girls. She founded Mama na Dada (Swahili for mother and sister) which has provided dozens of scholarships to date. Its Girl Child Education Program seeks to build in young girls the confidence to reject the common stereotypes about their own deficiency, and to dream big that they might follow on the footsteps of Mama Joyce.
Violence
The disenfranchisement of women is a global phenomenon, but the need for action against it is particularly urgent in Kenya. This is because the examples above are only symptoms; it is in the social realm that the real issues lie. In Kenya, marital rape is not recognized as a crime and according to U.N. estimates, a breathtaking 42 percent of Kenyan women have been battered by their husbands or partners. Perpetrators are rarely punished, however, because laws do not recognize domestic violence as a specific crime. In some of the more traditional areas of the country, women are still bought and sold with cattle.
Below is the experience of one of our members, which helps to illustrate just how huge the gap in the protection of women’s right to live without fear:
“During my time in Nyanza, I became involved in a struggle to get justice and healing for a four year old girl who had been raped by her adult neighbour. While a local organization called KARE Kenya were doing their best to assist the girls family, they did not have the resources to pay for the urgent medical attention the girl needed, nor the Ksh1,000 needed to file a police report. Once I agreed to take over the costs, KARE was able to provide the girl with medical attention, counselling to help her heal, as well as legal assistance so that the culprit would be apprehended. I was deeply affected by how obviously the child’s psyche had been damaged, and by the total lack of an institutional response to this horrible violence. The worst was yet to come however. When we finally were able to bring the case before the local police chief, his words were “Let the families sort it out among themselves. Maybe the family of the accused can give the girl’s family some livestock?”. “Hush-hush” was the infuriating attitude of the authorities. Such failure by the authorities to protect victims of abuse makes local organizations like KARE all the more important.”
Health
Maternal health in Kenya is very poor, 1 in every 16 women die in childbirth, compared to 1 in 4,000 in industrialized countries. This is partly because of the lack of facilities, partly because women get pregnant much earlier. It is now widely understood that women’s access to information on family planning, combined with the empowerment needed to force reluctant partners to adopt safe practices is the most effective way to reduce unwanted pregnancy, which is a tremendous draw on the quality of life of women. To stress the need for education on this vital subject, here’s a story from one of our volunteers working at ICODEI’s Women’s Health Program:
“Yesterday, the topic was 'Family Planning', and we were very pleased to note that both the contraceptive pill and condoms were freely available from local health clinics in the area. However, when the women began to open up about how practical these methods were, we discovered that they all held the belief that contraceptive injections and pills would lead to deformed 'creatures' being born!! One woman told of her sister's case, whereby after taking birth-control pills, her sister gave birth to a baby who had all the pills attached to its head! Another story involved the demonic antics of the contraceptive injection, which led to her sister-in-law giving birth to a baby with 3 legs and 4 arms...! Those myths, combined with group's insistence that none of their men would EVER wear a condom, has resulted in some very dubious methods of contraception being practiced which endanger the woman’s health and do nothing to prevent transmission of HIV or pregnancy.”
References and Further Reading
http://www.girleffect.org/
http://www.womensenews.org/story/the-world/070220/kenya-faces-hurdles-boosting-female-scientists
http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/kenya/facts.html
http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5hyYDRUBoyMv4qslVEi1H43kUVtEA |
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