Inquiry Blog Post #3

Hi everyone and welcome back to my blog! In this blog post, I am going to be documenting my first round of research for my inquiry question, which is ‘What is the root cause of gender wage discrepancy in Kenya?’

My first round of research involves looking in to some of the most common jobs in Kenya, as well as how those jobs contribute to the Kenyan economy. Understanding how the Kenyan work force functions will get me closer to finding the answer the my essential question. My question will most likely not have a fixed answer, but will most likely have many different contributing factors to it. This first round of research will help me to identify some of those contributing factors. Here is my documented research…

Kenya is most commonly known for farming and producing things like coffee, tea, fruits and grains. Farming these things is how the majority of the Kenyan population gets their income. In Kenyan society, the majority of job opportunities come from the agricultural sector, which employs more than 40% of the total population of the country and 70% of the more rural population (2). However, the expansion of the agricultural enterprise has been stunted due to the rapid growth of job opportunities in non-agricultural fields (1).

The fastest growing field of jobs in Kenya is the manufacturing sector. Over the past three decades, the country’s manufacturing sector has only contributed an average of 10 percent to the countries GPD, however, it is the sector that sees the most growth potential and has provided lots of manufacturing job opportunities (3). The textiles and apparel goods industry has seen lots of growth and has the country’s export rates by 26% in 2018 (3). Due to this, common jobs in this field in Kenya are working in textile mills spinning yarn, weaving and knitting, and growing and ginning cotton.

In summary, the most common jobs in Kenya take place in the agricultural and manufacturing sectors, which contribute greatly to the countries income. The conditions for a lot of the jobs in Kenya are not great (examples of thus being farming and yarn spinning) and do not have very good working conditions, let alone gender equality and equal wage distribution between genders. Knowing the common jobs in Kenya is crucial to answering my essential question, and this round of research has so far been very effective. Now that I know what the jobs are, for my next round of research, I can research their conditions and the average income, in further hopes of finding the answer to my essential question, ‘What is the root cause of gender wage discrepancy in Kenya’.

Thanks so much for reading this blog post. See you all in my next one!

My Sources…

1.https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5afacd43ed915d0df4e8ce4d/Jobs_in_Kenya.pdf

2. https://www.usaid.gov/kenya/agriculture-food-and-water-security#:~:text=OVERVIEW,percent%20of%20the%20rural%20population.

3. https://research.hktdc.com/en/article/MzY5MDQ5ODA3