Women hard hit by rising cost of living

Yunuke Moraa, at a ripe age of 60, should be winding down her life’s daily routine to mostly spending much of her time in her home in Kisii County playing with her grandchildren and generally, taking it easy.

Instead, the sexagenarian is engaged in a rat race on a daily basis as she has to wake up at 5am to go eke a living by selling potatoes at Daraja Mbili market in Kisii town.

“I do not want to be a beggar, depending on my children for everything,” she explains. “I have to find a way of making some money to meet some of my personal needs because I know how tough the economy is to everyone, including my children,” she adds.

Moraa says a 50 kilogramme sack of potatoes is going for Sh4,000 up from Sh2,000 less than a year ago— a 100 per cent increase. This has forced her to buy half a sack sometimes, and has had to charge her clients more

“Luckily most of my customers understand why I had to adjust the price, though some of them do not purchase in quantities they used to before the adjustment,” she says, “I used to sell three sacks of potatoes per day, but now I only sell one.”

A combination of factors — a slowdown in the world economy, a global supply chain, especially of commodities, struggling to recover from the Covid-19 disruption, rising oil prices, increasing production costs and the prospect of global food insecurity caused by a war in Ukraine — have conspired to drive up inflation — a measure of annual changes in the cost of living— across the world, including in Kenya, condemning a large part of the population including Moraa and her customers into a daily struggle just to survive.

The Kenya National Bureau of Statistics (KNBS) announced that the annual inflation rate in Kenya rose for the seventh consecutive month to 9.2 per cent in September 2022, above market forecasts of 8.6 per cent and is higher than the upper limit of the Central Bank of Kenya (CBK)’s target range of between 2.5 per cent and 7.5 per cent, a feat last recorded half a decade ago.

The Monetary Policy Committee (MPC), CBK’s decision-making organ, which met on September 29, 2022, said inflation in the advanced economies remains elevated mainly reflecting high oil and gas prices and lingering supply chain challenges, despite the recent moderation in commodity prices.

Gender bias

The Women’s Budget Group, a UK-headquartered independent network of leading academic researchers, policy experts and campaigners, however, says the rising cost of living has a gender bias.

In a brief, the group says the increase in the cost-of-living will hit the poorest hardest— and women are more likely to be poor, and have been hit harder by cuts to social security and provision of public services over the past decade.

“Women have lower levels of savings and wealth than men. Even before Covid-19, women were more likely to be in debt and this has worsened as a result of the pandemic,” it says.

The group says women’s caring responsibilities mean that they are often less able than men to increase their hours of paid work, as childcare costs were increasing above the rate of inflation for several years before this crisis.

“Women are the ‘shock absorbers of poverty’,” it says, “They tend to have the main responsibility for the purchase and preparation of food for their children and families, and for the management of budgets of poor households.”

Ruth Bosibori, a 40-year-old single mother of three, ekes a living by cleaning and doing laundry at Sh200 or Sh300.

“Most of my clients are cleaning their houses and washing their clothes themselves as a cost-cutting measure in the face of the rising cost of living, rendering me jobless,” she says.

To a majority of the people, including the underemployed, especially vulnerable groups such as women, the youth, Persons With Disabilities (PWDs) working in the informal sector, they have to calculate on how to grapple with the harsh economy realities, devising survival tactics on how to put food on the table and at the same time invest for the future.

Bosibori uses firewood, which she collects from nearby gardens and some pieces of timber or saw dust from workshops since she cannot afford cooking gas or kerosene.

“I prepare porridge in the morning, which we take as breakfast and lunch to save on both firewood and cost of food,” she says.

Women empowerment

Most of these have been forced to devise alternative ways of survival some coming up with a programme that guides them on what to buy, when to buy it, in what quantity to buy and at how much.

Jackline Kwamboka, a mother of two, who sells fruits says food being a top priority in her budget and those of her fellow women in their 20-member self-help group, they were forced to purchase food in bulk to benefit from supplier discounts as a mitigation measure against the high food prices.

“Upon analysing our expenses over a period of time, we realised we were spending a lot on daily purchase of food items. We started buying food items in bulk and then sharing them out among ourselves equally,” she says.

This could see her saving up Sh40 per food item per month, a figure when all the items are included and calculated over a period of three or six months or even a year makes a tidy some of cash saved and possibly channeled into her fruits  business.

Dr Abel Mokoro, an economist, calls on women to make efforts to empower themselves such as venturing into small businesses, joining self-help groups, learning new skills such as baking so that they become self-reliant.

“Women are the backbone of the family and are the one who know what the family eats. The economy has hit them hard and some may be skipping meals to preserve their share for their children,” he says.

Esnahs Nyaramaba, Chair of the Young Democrats, a lobby group in Kisii County, says the government, private sector, religious sector and community-based groups should initiate measures to empower women.

“We believe that an empowered woman is an empowered family, society and country as an association and this is why women are part of our empowerment programme. We have senstised more than 50 rural women to become economically self-reliant,” she says.

 “A full economic recovery accompanied by policies that, among others tackle the issue of corruption, is the only way out,” says Dr Mokoro