By Victor Oluoch
Expensive and inaccessible public services and infrastructure shackling women to unpaid care and domestic work stand in Kenya’s way to achieving its development goals, warns Oxfam.
“Inadequate water systems, fuel and cooking facilities result in women and girls having to make long and backbreaking daily trips to collect water and firewood, while under-funded health services mean they must walk miles to get medical care for their family,” notes Oxfam’s policy brief released today.
The statement draws on research and programming experience from Oxfam’s Women’s Economic Empowerment and Care (WE-Care) initiative in Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda and Zimbabwe.
Another tragedy, the statement observes, is that such free labour, “without which our economies would collapse”, accounts for $10 trillion of global output annually (roughly equivalent to 13 percent of global GDP) but is never in official GDP calculations and remains largely absent from government policies. Read more…
