Women
A Makueni where a woman’s circumstances do not determine her future.
This page is addressed to you directly, because most political writing about women in this county describes a demographic rather than speaking to the people in it.
Nothing on this page assumes you need to be empowered. You are already carrying a household, a business and usually somebody else’s children.
What follows is a list of the specific obstacles that came up most often in the listening meetings, and what an office in the National Assembly can honestly do about each one.
Your business, and the ceiling above it
You already know how to trade. What stops you is that the group can lend you forty thousand and the next step costs three hundred. The work here is on credit sized to a real business, and on making the funds that already exist reachable without three trips to Wote.
The paperwork that costs you a trading day
Registration, renewals, fund applications, tax questions. Every one of these currently costs a day you cannot spare. Ward level support staffed by people who actually know the forms would change more than another announcement of a new fund.
Land, and the document that is not in your name
A widow whose in-laws move in. A daughter left off a succession. A wife who has farmed a plot for twenty years with nothing on paper. These are lost at the procedural stage far more often than the moral one, which is why paralegal support and succession clinics matter.
Getting a fair price for what you grow
You carry the risk of the season and then accept a price set by a man with a lorry. Storage close to the farms, transparent weighing and payment terms that are written down are the parts of this chain that pressure can actually change.
Skills, and the market for them
Tailoring, catering, salon work, agribusiness, bookkeeping. Training is worth doing when it ends at a paying customer. Ask any programme who is earning twelve months later, and judge it on that answer.
Girls in school, and the reasons they leave
Fees, distance, pregnancy, sanitary provision, and the quiet assumption that a girl's education is the first thing to cut. Each of these is specific and each has a practical response that does not require a new law.
Women with disabilities
The difficulty is rarely the disability. It is the three steps into the bank, the meeting held upstairs, the latrine you cannot use. Public meetings in this campaign are held at ground level as a standing rule, not as a favour asked each time.
Households that are barely holding
A grandmother raising five grandchildren. A woman caring for a sick husband with no income. These households are known by name in every village. Support reaches them when it is targeted through people who know the village, and misses them when the list is compiled elsewhere.
If something here is wrong, say so
This page will be revised as the listening tour continues. If your ward’s situation is not described here properly, that is worth a phone call.