FEATURE ARTICLE
Ratio of enrollment in private and public educational institutions. Image credit: GSAPP core team
Protests against gender based violence in Kisumu. Image credit: http://www.hivisasa.com/kisumu/news/137630
THE TRIPLE ROLE THAT WOMEN PLAY Reproduction role - In most low-income households, the ‘women’s work’- the childbearing and rearing responsibilities -is the work required to guarantee the maintenance and reproduction of the labour force Production role - They are often forced to be secondary income earners. In rural areas this usually takes the form of work in the informal sector enterprises located either in the home through sub-contracting or piece-rate work or at the neighbourhood level through service markets such as tailoring or prostitution. Community Management role - In addition, women are involved in community management work undertaken at a local community level within the settlement. With the increasingly inadequate state provision of housing and basic services such as water and health, it is women who not only suffer the most but who are also forced to take responsibility for the allocation of limited resources to ensure the survival of their households.
relates directly to the role of care-taking that girls take on at a young age, a phenomenon observed world over in developing countries. A lack of access to formal education inevitably results in the lack of access to formal jobs. Also, what was previously a matter-of-fact expansion of the family with an accompanying expansion of land is now a single plot of land constantly subjected to fragmentation and division with each passing generation. The result of this self-division of land is evident in the physical fabric of Manyatta. Besides a
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CITY OBSERVER | June 2016
number of other reasons, this division of plots and the resulting spatial layout has also made it difficult for the government to access the settlement for laying basic infrastructure i.e. sewage lines, roads, electric lines and water pipes. A number of factors have reinforced the development of Manyatta into a slum belt, such as all land being privately owned, existence of multiple landowners within a ‘plot’, dense clusters of low-rise housing with no public space, lack of governmental regulation, support or control in terms of growth, infrastructure and resource allocation, and location within a low-lying land area.