Browsing by Subject "women’s roles"

Pastoral livelihoods are currently changing in Kenya. Economic, societal and environmental development of the country has led to increased standard of living and demand of livestock products in the markets. The rising demand to contribute to food production puts pressure on pastoralist production, while keeping livestock is becoming more challenging due to changes in land use, commercialisation and climate change. Pastoralists are at crossroads, in which they should adapt to the mentioned changes through options such as sedentarisation and livelihood diversification while taking gender into account. Pastoralists are relatively vulnerable due to being a socially marginalized group in Kenya and several development actors are now focusing their projects on pastoralists in order to support them in adaptation. However, Mausch et al. (2021) have argued that development projects often neglect the needs of the target group. Including the target group’s opinions and aspirations to project objectives can lead to more inclusive and sustainable outcomes. ESSA - Earth observation and environmental sensing for climate-smart sustainable agropastoral ecosystem transformation in East Africa is an example of a development project which could benefit from acknowledging target group’s aspirations. Within the systemic change of pastoralism it is crucial to look more deeply at separate pastoral communities. Pastoralism is connected to environment, culture and history which vary between locations, thus they cannot be categorised as a homogeneous group. However, most pastoral communities share the traditional labour division between women and men. In patriarchal pastoral communities women have traditionally been responsible for work labelled as reproduction. Pastoral women have not had the same opportunities in life or representation in society as pastoral men or women in urban areas which puts them in a doubly marginalised position. In this study I combine mapping livelihood aspirations of women and exploring womanhood in the context of pastoralism. The choice to focus on pastoral women’s livelihood aspirations is influenced by the field of feminist geography, the lack of information on pastoral womanhood, the ESSA project and my personal interest towards strengthening the position of women in Global South. The aim of this research is to explore livelihood aspirations of six pastoral Maasai women in Taveta Sub-County, Kenya. Additionally, I am searching for possible connections between the aspirations and the women’s current positions and roles. This research also contributes to the ESSA project by providing information on pastoral womanhood and women’s opinions towards beekeeping, because ESSA’s women-related objectives include livelihood diversification through beekeeping. Feminist geography materialises through aims to broaden the understanding of lives of women, who have traditionally not gained attention in science. This work also includes extensive self-reflection of my position as the researcher, which is instrumental in feminist geography. The research material was collected through fieldwork which took place in six households close to Salaita Hill and Lake Jipe. The research methods were participative observation and semi-structured interviews which were executed with the support of two translators. The research material consists of field diary, in which I report what I observed, interview transcriptions and ESSA’s project paper. In this research I represented the women’s future livelihood aspirations as the women expressed them, and analysed the type of aspirations. The women wanted to continue pastoralism, although most of them were also interested in diversifying their livelihoods to farming, business and casual labour. The women knew relatively little about beekeeping, and the main message from the interviews was that these Maasai women are afraid of bees. Thus, they were not interested in beekeeping as livelihood. From the field diary and interview transcriptions I interpreted that there were connections between the livelihood aspirations, pastoral culture and its patriarchal characteristics, which determine women’s thoughts. Additionally, it seemed that casual work and lack of education might affect the livelihood aspirations. However, the conclusions of this research are not objective because they are interpretations affected by my subjective positionality as the researcher.