Gender Equality and Women\u27s Solidarity Across Religious, Ethnic and Class Difference in the Kenyan Constitutional Review Process

Abstract

This paper examines Kenyan\u27s women\u27s struggle to gain new legal authority for gender equality and women\u27s empowerment in the Kenya Constitutional Review process. Specifically it examines the efforts of the campaign to safeguard the gains of women in the Draft Constitution, a campaign launched by a coalition of four civil society organizations in Kenya after the release of a new Draft constitution in 2002. Its focus is the 2002 Draft, the Draft\u27s relationship to the current Kenyan Constitution and to recent constitutional proposals, from a gender perspective. The constitutional review process is part of a larger movement to democratize the Kenyan post-colonial state and one in which women have struggled to find a voice. In the absence of women\u27s solidarity across their differences, differences exacerbated by the nature of post-colonial state, the democracy movement threatens to leave women behind in a legal and social web of beliefs and practices that subordinate them. The paper examines the history of the Kenyan women\u27s movement, the events that led up to the formation of the campaign to safeguard the gains of women in the Draft constitution, and the campaign\u27s fight for gender equality within the constitution. It then analyzes the conflicts the campaign faced that magnified the differences among women and threatened to undermine their solidarity around the idea of gender equality. These conflicts included differences across religion in the form of disputes about the retention of Kadhi\u27s courts in the constitution, disputes across ethnicity around constitutional schemes to devolve government and decentralize executive authority, and differences across class in terms of electoral representation given the apparent divide between rural and urban women