Women’s agency and educational policy : The experiences of the women of Kilome-Kenya

• Main Author: Kiluva-Ndunda, Mutindi Mumbua
• Language: English
• Published: 2009
• Subjects: Women > Education > Kenya
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/2429/7519

This study examines women’s experiences of formal education in Kenya. The study aims at making visible the cultural, historical, economic and political factors that shaped, and continue to shape, women’s educational and employment opportunities. It also highlights women’s agency exemplified in their struggle to provide their children, and particularly their daughters, with educational opportunities. The study draws attention to the gender and power issues that limit women’s participation in the public sphere. These are issues that policy makers, politicians, and development agents have not and still do not adequately address. The study employs post-positivist research methodologies, particularly feminist methodologies informed by post-colonial critiques. The women in this study are treated as social agents not as victims of men, and of economic and political trends. The women formulate strategies aimed at influencing or shaping the social system in which they are a part. The women’s agency resides in their individual and communal endeavours and is constantly reinvented in the context of political and social change. This research is an analysis of the experiences of 38 women born, raised and partly schooled in Kilome division, Makueni district. It focuses on the educational experiences of rural women living in two villages and a small town in Kilome division, Kenya. I use the women’s discourse to critique the public discourse on education articulated in policy documents produced in the last 30 years since independence in 1963. This study illustrates how women in Kenya have been largely absent at the national level where educational policies are formulated. Policy making has remained male dominated. Policy makers, charged with structuring and restructuring education to meet the country’s development needs, continue to limit women’s agency to the private sphere. The formulation of policies from the male perspective has intensified the public and private dichotomy. Absent in the public discourse on education has been the discussion of how gender, a social construction, has influenced opportunities available to men and women in colonial and post-colonial Kenya. Colonial gender constructions of femininity have continued to limit educational opportunities made available to women in post-colonial Kenya. The Kenyan women in this study are cognizant of how these gendered assumptions shaped, and continue to shape, women’s educational and employment opportunities. They re-negotiate and resist these gendered assumptions and they have become intervention agents for their children’s education. The women’s agency, however, is limited by their lack of economic power. The interplay between gendered cultural assumptions about femininity and the increased costs of schooling imposed by policy makers continue to have a negative impact on women’s education.