Perceptions of empowerment among Women involved in Coffee farming in Kirinyaga East Sub-county, Kirinyaga County

Abstract

Women empowerment play a key role in helping women improve the wellbeing of their households. However, gender systems have remained complex and dynamic. Regions, communities, and countries have different social constructions that make women levels of empowerment to differ. Women in most African communities for a long time remained stewards to their house hold properties but have no access to ownership. Even though the status of women participating in agriculture has received much attention from different studies over the recent years, there still exists research gap concerning the level of empowerment for women in farming activities. This study sought to understand the level of empowerment among women involved in coffee farming, the types of resources and income accessible to and controlled by women as well as the levels of satisfaction of women involved in coffee farming. The study adopted a descriptive survey research design and the findings were used for generalisation of the state of current empowerment of women in farming. The target population was all women participating in coffee farming Kirinyaga East sub-county, Kirinyaga County. Quantitative data was obtained from a sample of 394 participants obtained through simple random sampling from a potential universe of 26,000 small scale women farmers. Qualitative data was obtained from 8 key informants that were purposively sampled. According to findings, 37.2% of the women interviewed were aged between 18-39 years while 53.5% were aged between 40-59 years. Only 19.3 % of the women involved in coffee farming aged 60 years and above. Out of the total sample, only 8.1% had accessed post-secondary education, therefore their main source of income was farming. The findings revealed that 63.5% of the respondents have their farms registered in the names of husbands or their father-in-law. Only 16.8% of the women who have managed to gain land ownership and its registration under their names. Albeit, they are either widowed or single. For the married women, only 19.8% owned land jointly with their husbands. The findings show that the level of education acquired by the women did not have much effect of their ability to be fully registered as land owners as opposed to those who had accessed minimal or no education at all since only 1.6% of the women who had acquired tertiary education had land registered under themselves. The data illustrates that only 27.9% could access payments and dividends from coffee proceeds as opposed to the rest whose husbands and other family members’ access. Patriarchy in assets and land ownership as well as access to income is still highly dominant. Most women take care of the coffee in all stages but have none or limited access to its proceeds. There is however to some extent, elements of joint participation where a proportion 54.4% the women are involved by their husbands in decision making concerning income from coffee farming, assets purchase, sale, and transfer of assets. Women also set aside sufficient time to participate in other leisure activities. From this study, it is noted that women have a key role to play in coffee farming yet they have minimal access to and control of resources as opposed to men. Moreover, there exists a high level of ignorance over empowerment as depicted by respondents’ levels of satisfaction with decision making over income, access to and control of asset despite the fact is that the power over those variables’ rest with their husbands.