04/02/2026
I (Katindi Sivi) am a serial mentor because I stand on the shoulders of others. In one of those sessions, Bina Maseno (my friend - USIU Alumni, and my student . President Kenya and Strathmore University Young Leaders Programme) called me for a cup of tea to vent. We discussed everything from the scarcity of elected young women to the frustration that political leadership trainings often lack relevance to Kenyan realities, including the fact that those who have gone before her, like myself, had not left behind a sufficient reference point - leaving her to navigate the same grueling learning cycle.
That pricked my conscience. I proposed that we move beyond ‘tea and talk’ and dive into a focused solution. By helping her team conduct research and mentoring her organization to lead data-backed analysis, Badili Africa would be positioned to generate the reference material others so desperately need. In 2024, a partnership between Futures Foundation and Badili Africa was born. This intergenerational collaboration embarked on a project to document young women’s experiences in the 2017 and 2022 political campaigns. We trained 20 fresh graduates in qualitative research methods and they interviewed 122 young women across 30 counties. By documenting the informal, regressive socio-political realities faced by young women aspirants, this work surfaced a flawed assumption in the democratic space: that the lack of women in leadership is merely a ‘skills gap’ or a ‘lack of willingness to engage’.
The data proves otherwise. The real culprit is the informal, murky, and often predatory and patriarchal ecosystem that dictates political outcomes in Kenya. It is a brutal system that leaves candidates jaded at best and permanently scathed at worst - whether by financial drain, psychological trauma, sexual harassment, severed relationships, or systematic character assassination. Despite their courage, the success rate for young women remains devastatingly low: only 9% were elected in 2017, and 5% in 2022.
Our view in this book is that we must shift from fixing women’ to ‘fixing the systems.’ To move the needle toward true representation, we must focus on supporting the candidate’s entire ecosystem, navigating the informal spaces of voter mobilization, gatekeeping, security risks, etc. and demanding institutional responsibility.
This work is vital in two main ways: (i) It serves as a reference point for women to psychologically prepare for the dirty informal tactics prevalent in political campaigns. (ii) It seeks to bridge the gap between the ‘promise of inclusion’ and the ‘realities of exclusion' by shifting the focus from individual readiness to systemic reform. We provide a basis for targeted, long-term interventions in leadership trainings to ‘upgrade the software’ (the individual) as much as include ‘hardware’ interventions (the political system).
Enjoy reading “A Political Ecosystem Designed to Exclude Young Women in Kenya.” I will provide the ebook link shortly
