The boy child lagging behind their female peers in Kenya ought to worry everyone!

Kenya has made great strides both in its social and economic development since attaining independence from Britain in 1963. The country had, at independence, a small population, which grew past 9 million in 1999, driven by the then-raging high fertility (an average of 6 children per family). And while families were relatively poor in the 1970’s, parents put great efforts to ensure their own children attended school. The result was, during our youth, large classes of 40 to 50 students in primary schools.

Globally, the last thirty years have seen many countries achieve rapid social and economic transformation driven by the need to reduce poverty; improve survival and life expectancy; individual rights and better access to both employment opportunities and services for everyone regardless of their gender, accident of spatial location and/or birth. Kenya is not an exception in this regard; and the country has made and implemented many policy choices, which require objective regular reviews with a view of i) vacating those that have not worked well in the communities, ii) accelerating pace for implementation of those that have resulted in better than expected positive outcomes and impact, and/or ii) to adjust course on those (like the Empowerment of the Girl Child Doctrine...) which on the large part have resulted in immense positive value but also evidently created conditions for emergence of consequential unintended negative outcomes and impact.

It is evident that women in many countries around the world historically have not had the same opportunities for employment or the right to vote as their male counterparts. Even here in Kenya, women too had their own share of challenges. My own mother never got the opportunity to attend school in her youth (in the 1940’s) because the prevailing wisdom back then was that educating boys was a much better bet, granted women were expected to be stay-at-home mums and/or the investment in them was essentially ceded for exploitation by others when they got married away. Her inability to read and write in English never enabled her to check our school homework. Learning, though, isn’t limited to attending formal schooling or induction by the educated elite. I did, in my youth, learn from her, something which no schools teach as a life skill often, if at all: ‘the importance of creating compartments around sensitive information entrusted to one’.

When the Girl Child Empowerment movement came to Kenya, it found a ready fertile ground to take root. The local Civil Society Organisations partnered with those from the Global North to advocate for policy and social changes to create equal opportunities and guarantee rights for everyone regardless of gender. The selected interventions prioritised girls and women, and the pattern has not altered much today. Enormous amounts of resources were and still are allocated and deployed to both review and support the implementation of more female gender-sensitive laws and policies. These have paved the way for better rights for women in general and improved their opportunities in every facet of life. The resultant has been a more empowered and very assertive class of women in the country.

The tide on the need to address gender inequality has turned. Today, it is the male one that is gasping for air in Kenya. Go to any University or College in the country and you are more likely to find girls outnumber boys 3:1 in most classes at any level. In my own village in Meru County, 10 students joined University over the last two years; but for one, the rest are all girls. When we see these asymmetrical imbalances in gender representation in class in our institutions, the default unasked question is always: who will marry our girls when they graduate? We all, from curious observations, know that young women date and marry men upstream, not downstream. But for a few outliers, they largely date and marry men who are more accomplished than themselves in attributes like educational attainment and discernible potential, work/career position and other social determinants like wealth and ability to take care of them and their own children. The upward match and success of women in many fields in Kenya has forced many men to yield their gender roles, and to give up, including the all-important biological nudge to start their own families. Many have overstayed their welcome in their parents’ homes, with some never seeking to work; and inordinately many taking to drinking alcoholic liquor made in some unregulated backroom cottage breweries and/or smoking weed in the open with little regard for the risk of doing up to 18 years in jail if caught. Mental health issues are plenty today and many a village and/or urban centre has its own share of roaming mad men needing rescue, but none is forthcoming, or the problem is too big for Mental Health Depts in the Counties to cope.

Kenya has had a robust family planning programme and which sought to support couples to reduce births to a number they could adequately cater for without significant constraints or stressing the common public health and education services. In some regions today, though, there is a real risk of communities suffering terminal decline in the next twenty years. Our lagging young men are scared of dating more accomplished women; and the more educated young women too are complaining about their own inability to find viable suitors. The result has been fewer babies born or none conceived to even attempt to replace the ageing population in places. I have not seen a woman in my rural village carrying a toddler in the last two years. We all read about towns in Denmark, Italy, Japan, South Korea and Sweden dying out slowly and being abandoned due to population decline occasioned by low fertility and the death of the ageing in society. The same picture is quietly playing out here in Kenya in some of our regions and communities.

To address some of the challenges the boy child/ young men are facing in Kenya, and to ensure both genders grow together and find common cause, the Government and communities need to work together to craft workable solutions. A lot of well-thought-out advocacy work is needed to encourage women to allow graded lifting of the boy child/men without undermining their gains achieved over the years in general.

Straw surveys in communities seem to indicate that the absence of biological fathers is to blame for our boys’ erosion of confidence, bad conduct and poor performance at school. In the olden days, if the biological father was absent, an uncle took on the role of mentoring and objective correction of the child until they were in their mid-teens to institutionalise acceptable behavioural attributes. Those who have raised boys know that many of them stop taking instructions from their mothers when they become teens. And why did we stop using identified uncles from bridging the gap and playing this positive father-figure mentorship role? 

The greater society too has a role in helping raise boys who become skilled, responsible adults and who contribute meaningfully to the country’s development. Many communities had social regimentation practices that nurtured boys and held them to account at every stage in life. While many of those cultural practices in our communities have taken a back seat due to church doctrine and the adoption of Western values, some can still play an important role. There is, however, a need for these to be well vetted and implemented through a framework and oversight regime that provides adequate safeguarding to protect boys and young men from identifiable harm. The Jewish community, even in America, has without hesitation kept alive today their traditional regimentation practices for boys and young men.

The Ministry of Education (MoE)’s recruitment and staffing policy has contributed to challenges facing the boy child. During our days in primary school in the 1970’s, teachers were about evenly distributed in gender. Today, the Lower Primary and Early Childhood Education teaching staff are majority women. Therefore, boys who are struggling to find a role model to identify with at home never find one at school either during their most impressionable formative years. What we have done is created conditions by policy direction to raise a cohort of men who are implicitly socialised to be like girls in many respects. The boys are corrected by female teachers for conduct that would pass and get categorised as male expression, and this undermines a tad their masculinity! Should we then be surprised that boys take a negative turn very early in life and eventually pay the price in poor outcomes?

There is a need to review this MoE policy to intentionally ensure an adequate number of male teachers are brought in too to engage boys at all levels of their primary education. Further, the men who went to these same schools too in their area, and are accomplished, ought to find social purpose and volunteer to go back regularly to mentor the young and to give their own testimony that nothing can stop an enduringly determined individual (whether a boy or girl) from achieving their own dreams but themselves.

Dr Muraah is a health systems, strategy and M&E consultant