Women’s Participation in Leadership and Governance in Kenya: Analysis of the Strengthening inclusive governance and leadership for women programme

KU-WEE Hub has completed a study to evaluate the Strengthening Inclusive Leadership project under Women Empowerment Link’s (WEL) transformative and leadership project. The WEL is a non-profit, non-partisan, non-governmental women’s rights organisation that seeks to empower women and girls to realize their full potential, worth and strength politically, socially and economically through advocating for their human and social justice rights.

Under the transformative leadership and governance programme, WEL with support from Brot fur die welt, Germany, is implementing a project dubbed Strengthening Inclusive Leadership (SIL). The project focusses to increase the number and participation of women in decision making positions, socially, economically and politically in Kenya.

The project is staggered in three phases. The first phase was geared towards increasing public support for women leadership and visibility in the communities. The two-year project targeted seven counties: Nakuru, Siaya, Mombasa, Taita Taveta, Kiambu, Machakos and Nyeri.

Findings of the study indicate that: that the training-of-trainers model that the strengthening inclusive leadership project is based on is effective in reaching most of the women at the grassroot. Further, the strategies used by WEL have a good retention rate as evidenced by the diverse social economic clusters of women at the grassroot that the project reached and was able to retain. However, too many gender roles around the family hindered women from attending project meetings regularly, and project targeting only women made it difficult for the same women to negotiate for space with men who are not part of their gender trainings

The comprehensive report will be shared on our website as soon as it is complete.