Epsilon Archive for Student Projects

Abstract

This study looks at how women running bio-based enterprises in Kenya work with sustainability in practice, and why that work so rarely translates into the recognition, resources or economic mobility it deserves. Kenya's bioeconomy is gaining policy attention as a route to inclusive and sustainable development, and is described as being at a defining moment. How women actually experience and navigate this transition remains largely unexplored, especially in African contexts.

The research uses a qualitative, comparative approach drawing on 22 interviews conducted across nine counties, individual conversations with women entrepreneurs, group discussions with 53 participants, and interviews with key informants from government, research and the private sector. Women work across four bio-based clusters: value addition to primary produce and circular food systems, bio-based agricultural inputs, bio-based industrial development and sustainable bioenergy.

Three questions structure the findings: how women's environmental knowledge, built through daily work with land and resources, not through training, is recognised and supported by institutions; how gender norms shape experiences simultaneously across institutions, households and self-perception, producing coping strategies rather than structural change; and how institutional barriers around land, credit, infrastructure, markets and policy lock into each other, compounding exclusion.

The central argument, developed through feminist political ecology, Haraway's situated knowledges and Fraser's misrecognition and maldistribution, is that these are not isolated problems but a system, producing a gap between what women already know and practise and what the institutions around them are built to support. Collective organisation helps, but cannot substitute for financial instruments adapted to small-scale production, support designed around women's actual conditions, or structural shifts in who captures value in markets.

The study contributes grounded evidence to debates on gender and the bioeconomy in African contexts, and points toward what financial instruments, support programmes and market structures would need to look like to actually reach the women doing the work.