Navigating within the Development Nexus: The Women's Movement in Kenya

Persisting images of African women are controversial and depict women both as victims of their environment and/or as powerful agents of change. For instance, the 1970s development nexus postulated that development without the empowerment of women is impossible, while at the same time designing an image of African women as “poor and powerless” and in need of assistance to access gender justice. Almost simultaneously women from the South opposed the allegedly exclusive white feminism that dominated the UN Conferences on Women and thereby the UN Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination (CEDAW), conceiving it as upper-class and ethnocentric. African female scholars thus reacted by condemning feminism as western, imperialist and not suitable to local realities. In this contradicting field women’s movements oppose, adopt, appropriate and reinterpret gender roles and relations circulated within the development nexus.

Based on an empirical research on the Kenyan women’s movement I will illustrate one the one hand to what extent activists refer to CEDAW as international norm. The convention is an important source for defining gender inequalities and relations in order to legitimize the claims of the movement in opposition to the state. On the other hand CEDAW exacerbates solidarity between women’s activists because some deny the Convention as western concept. Likewise contradicting are donor resources, because the women’s movement is highly depending on donor funding. In order to get access to donor funding activists navigate between gender policies of donor agencies and their local realities. This becomes particular obvious in the debates about the role of women within the welfare state, contents such as polygamy or abortion. Thus, the paper draws attention to contradicting edges of norms and development policies circulated within the development nexus and shows how female activists navigate in-between different visions about gender roles and relations.