From the 2016 survey of Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises Entrepreneurial (MSMEs), there are 7.41 million MSMEs in Kenya of which 5.85 million are informal and 1.56 million are formal.
More than 60 percent of the informal are women-owned. With respect to the formal enterprises, some 47.9 percent are male-owned while women own 32.2 percent.
These data reveal not just how unequal a society we have become but how much creativity we have suppressed.
By bringing the world’s largest excluded group, women, into the economic fold, we could unleash their economic power, thereby spurring robust economic growth, dynamism and ingenuity. This was the message from Christine Lagarde, IMF managing director, at the World Assembly for Women conference in Tokyo held in September 2014.
In many communities across Africa, however, women entrepreneurial activities are not considered primarily as “work.” Not by mistake but a strategic cultural practice meant to devalue the woman’s work and make it subordinate to that of her spouse.
I feel compelled to write this piece owing to my encounter with some aspiring women entrepreneurs. The lead organiser of the workshop had attended one of the monthly sessions with women at the School of Business, University of Nairobi. Cautiously, she asked me if I could talk to a group of her friends on a similar topic we had covered.
I agreed to meet them at Kasarani where most of them live. My plan was to be at the venue by 9 am and be out by 11 am. However, we were still deep into the discussions by 2 pm. They listened intently, took notes and weighed in with questions. These women wanted knowledge, information and education. I stopped looking at my watch to relish the treasure of a focus group in front of me to understand entrepreneurial dynamics in Kenya that no one can teach you.
Some of these women could grow beyond the acceptable ceiling their families can live with. Instead they comply with cultural dictates. It is very easy to say that Kenyans enjoy freedom that they can do what they want. No. It is perhaps only a few who enjoy unfettered freedom. I gathered that in order for women to succeed as entrepreneurs and ensure a sustainable marriage, they have to measure every word that comes out of their mouth while interacting with members of their families.
The cultural embeddedness of economic and political practices is such that women have zero chance of ever changing it as long as it remains a taboo to genuinely talk about it. It is the economy that suffers when women cannot exploit their full potential.
Entrepreneurship is the product of an individual’s creative and innovative spirit crafted into an enterprise, which creates employment and morphs into wealth creation that is essential to capital formation and economic prosperity. Our continued practices of making women vestiges of our imaginations breed the poverty that Africa languishes in. From the 2016 survey of Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises Entrepreneurial (MSMEs), there are 7.41 million MSMEs in Kenya of which 5.85 million are informal and 1.56 million are formal. More than 60 percent of the informal are women-owned. With respect to the formal enterprises, some 47.9 percent are male-owned while women own 32.2 percent.
These data reveal not just how unequal a society we have become but how much creativity we have suppressed. In its 2012 Report, the World Bank noted in a chapter titled What’s happened and what’s needed that gender inequality has more costs in an increasingly integrated world. It can diminish a country’ ability to compete internationally—particularly for countries with export potential in goods and services with high female employment.
And given growing global awareness of women’s rights, continued gender inequality can also hurt a country’s international standing.
These factors strengthen the incentives for policy action toward gender equality around the world. Many of those who now work in the informal sector the majority of who happen to be women, have a college education but like some in the group I addressed, are vending vegetables.
Policy makers should be aware of this misallocation of resources and through tax provide incentives to make these women more productive so that they can recruit more people. There is no point of always speaking of unemployment as a challenge when we stifle its creation. In women we have latent economic power that must be unleashed in order to realize the full potential in them. But we must first genuinely deal with the cultural embeddedness in our economic and political practices.
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