How Africa's Food Security Depends on Women — And Why Kenya Keeps Ignoring That

Walk into any maize farm in Meru. Any tea plantation plot in Nyamira. Any vegetable nursery in Mwea. Count who is doing the hoeing, the planting, the weeding, the harvesting. You will find women — predominantly women — doing work that feeds this country.

The World Bank and IFAD both estimate that women account for between 65 and 75 percent of food production in sub-Saharan Africa. In Kenya, Agriculture Ministry estimates — when disaggregated by gender, which they often are not — consistently show female farmers contributing the majority of subsistence and small-scale commercial food production. This is not a secret. It is widely cited in every agricultural development conference held in Nairobi's Westlands hotels.

And yet. The Sh2,000 fertiliser subsidy that was one of President Ruto's most celebrated interventions was distributed through agro-dealers and NCPB outlets using ID-based registration processes that systematically disadvantaged women without formal land title — who tend to farm on family land registered in their husbands' or fathers' names. Studies commissioned by two development partners found that fewer than 20 percent of subsidy beneficiaries in several pilot counties were women.

The Hustler Fund, to its credit, has reached more women than its critics predicted — the collateral-free structure removes one barrier that excludes women from formal credit. But a mobile phone micro-loan of Ksh5,000 is not agricultural financing. It does not buy a pump irrigation kit. It does not fund a greenhouse. It does not let a woman farmer in Meru buy fertiliser in bulk to sell to her neighbours.

"Women are not afraid of change — they are afraid of being left behind by it," said one of the speakers at a food security conference I attended this week. If Kenya is serious about food security — and with El Niño threatening next season's rains, we need to be very serious — we need to stop designing agricultural policy around the farmer we imagine and start designing it around the farmer who is actually there.