Gender Mainstreaming and Monitoring of Crime Prevention Projects by Police Officers in Londiani Sub-county, Kericho,kenya

Abstract

Gender mainstreaming has been a subject of contention in all organizations globally. It has been met with a lot of difficulties and has been unsuccessful or achieved very little success in its implementation. As a result of this, the composition of male and female employees has never been equal in number in the work place. This study looked into gender mainstreaming and monitoring of crime prevention projects by police officers in Londiani sub-county. The study adopted the following four objectives; to determine the extent to which gender equality influences monitoring crime prevention projects in Londiani sub-county; to determine the extent to which gender responsiveness influence monitoring of crime prevention projects in Londiani sub-county; to determine how working environment influence monitoring of crime prevention projects in Londiani subcounty andto determine the extent to which training influence monitoring of crime prevention projects in Londiani Sub-County. The research design that was used is descriptive research design which utilizes both qualitative and quantitative research. Selfadministered questionnaires were used to collect data from randomly selected respondents who were a total of 210 police officers and a sample of 136respondents from three different police stations where 117 questionnaires were returned translating to 86% response rate. Pilot testing was done for pretesting of instruments on the study among 25 police officers from Kipkelion sub-county where Cronbach's Alpha coefficient achieved 0.936 thus showed the reliability of research instrument. Both descriptive and inferential statistics was used to analyze data using statistical package for social scientists (SPSS) version 21. The theories used were transformation model and general deterrence theory. Stratified random sampling procedure was used to draw samples from the total population for the study. Gender mainstreaming had significance on monitoring of crime and prevention of crime in Londiani Sub-County as shown by R value of 0.948. The R squared value of 0.898 shows that the independent variables accounted for 89.8% of the variance on monitoring of crimes prevention projects while 10.2% are explained by other variables not in the study. There was a positive significant relationship between monitoring crime prevention and gender equality r (177) = 0.756, p< 0.01, monitoring crime prevention and gender responsiveness r (177) = 0.854 p< 0.01, monitoring crime prevention and working environment r (177) = 0.784, p< 0.01 and monitoring crime prevention and training r (177) = 0.916 p< 0.01. There is need to harmonize the number of women police officers to those of men officers at different levels in senior positions and in various department. Lucrative assignments should be equally assigned to both gender and where necessary female officer be paired with male officers.