Emerging Procurement Laws and Women's Empowerment : Assessing the Costs and Benefits of the Privatization of the Telecommunications Sector in Kenya

The onset of privatization in the 1980s came with the promise not only of reviving development in the Third World, but also of unleashing the huge potential of the private sector, especially for women. Ever since the 1990s, Kenya has embarked on the restructuring of its telecommunications services in a bid to improve accessibility to all citizens. Yet despite this restructuring yielding significant dividend in terms of social and economic development, Kenya still lags behind other developing countries in term of Gender-related Human Development Index (GDI). This, notwithstanding the fact that gender parity is today considered as a sine qua non for national development (UNDP, 1995). Drawing mainly from secondary data, this study seeks to find out how far women have benefited from the restructuring of Kenya's telecommunications sector since the onset of privatization. The basic assumption of the study, drawn from the neo-patrimonial approach, is that the capacity of women to take advantage of economic reforms in telecommunications sector and to benefit both economically and socially has been undermined by the neo-patrimonial nature of Kenya's political system, whereby those who benefit from such opportunities are largely people or groups perceived to be “politically correct.”