Why Kenya's Consumer Protection Regime Needs a Gender Lens
Image Generated by Gemini . [i] Article by Ninette Mwarania and Abiud Lagat . [ii] Millions of Kenyan women buy food, pay school fees, take out loans, transact through mobile money and sign insurance policies daily. They represent a segment of consumers who occasionally experience concerns, be it a defective product, a predatory loan, a fraudulent digital transaction, a late delivery or even expired milk. The challenge, however, is that empirical evidence suggests that women are far less likely than men to formally complain. The tragedy, is that Kenya's consumer protection system is not designed to notice, let alone fix, that gap. A 14 year analysis of the Competition Authority of Kenya's (the Authority) 2,682 unique consumer complaints between FY2012/13 and FY2025/26 [1] tell a stark story. 1,770 (66.1%) of these complaints were lodged by men and 912 (33.9%) by women, roughly two complaints from men for one from a woman. Set against Kenya's actual popu...