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Kenya: Tired Old Answers to New Problems Won't Help Girls


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The Nation (Nairobi)

OPINION
16 May 2008
Posted to the web 16 May 2008

Lucy Oriang'
Nairobi

THE ANNOUNCEMENT WAS simple enough, if not particularly rousing: The Ministry of Higher Education, Science and Technology is to launch a Distinguished Women Scientists Award.

The news came at the end of a workshop at the Sun 'n' Sand Resort in Kilifi.

Minister Sally Kosgei also sent a message promising a "comprehensive" policy for Cabinet consideration.

This is the point at which those who champion women's rights would be breaking into song and dance - if they were living in the '80s and '90s. All it does now is bring on a sense of déjà vu.

This sounds like the language of the early feminist movement. But let us not knock a good thing.

The messages had their place - raising awareness, as we would say in NGO-speak.

It was not just pointless noise from sexually frustrated women; they were raising a matter that would haunt us with time.

All things being equal, we should by now have taken it for granted that women will be holding forth in the sciences beyond those ones related to the home.

Yet we are still getting worked up enough to hold workshops at exclusive getaways to discuss the matter.

Is it not time to find another way to get to blast away our problems?

That there is an issue is not in doubt. In national exams, girls routinely perform better than boys only in English, Kiswahili and Home Science.

There have been suggestions that this may be due to science facilities in girls' schools not being good enough. But that can hardly be news to the ministry.

When it comes to university, more girls are likely to enrol at Kenyatta University, 40 per cent at the last count, because of its focus on education and arts courses.

Jomo Kenyatta and Egerton, which are into the sciences, had 30 per cent and 25.6 per cent female enrolment.

I have great admiration for Dr Sally Kosgei, who is probably one of the most influential high commissioners that Kenya ever sent to the United Kingdom.

She was also one of the most charismatic heads of the Civil Service.

But with all due respect to her and the smart women and men who gathered in Kilifi, it is time this debate moved to a more creative platform.

Enough of the moaning and groaning, please.

It is tiresome, and increasingly irritating, for us to continue saying the same things that we first heard in the decade that lasted between 1975, when we had International Women's Year, and 1985, when we closed it in Nairobi.

Girls born in 1975 are now all of 33-years-old. If nothing has changed significantly in the interim, there must be something wrong, either with the concept or the strategy.

I refuse to believe that it could be the first.

Even the most dedicated misogynist can accept that women are not so fundamentally flawed that they cannot grasp the theories and formulas of science.

OUR NOBEL LAUREATE WANGARI Maathai, holds a doctorate in science. And she is not even a product of the women's liberation movement.

Those who tried to teach me physics, chemistry and home science - without much success, poor dears! - were fully female and on top of their game.

But there is a time for everything, and every campaign needs to adopt different strategies at different stages.

We raised the red flag, and it was good. Now we need to raise the game and change with the times.

Let's begin with the Maathai Method.

When the good woman wanted Kenya and the world to hear her battle-cry for the environment, she moved out of the classroom and boardroom and set up camp at Karura Forest - where she once staged a stand-off with policemen.

Relevant Links

East Africa
Kenya
Women and Gender

She took on former President Moi over plans to build a humongous monument to himself in a prime corner of Uhuru Park. He called her names; the 60-foot statue did not go up.

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