Kenya: Women’s Suffrage and Political Participation as Voters

Abstract

Women’s political participation as voters in Africa has received little attention in the extant women and politics literature. This chapter discusses women’s suffrage and voting exercise in Kenya as a case study, focusing on the challenges women voters face in exercising their voting right in the country’s gendered electoral process. Though the country has granted universal suffrage since independence, many eligible female voters still do not or cannot vote due to those challenges, which undermines the quality of elections, one of the fundamentals of democracy. Unless those challenges disappear, women’s effective participation in the political process as voters is less likely to happen.