Jesica-akeyo/-Kenya-workforce-gender-disparities

Gender-disaggregated analysis of Kenya's labour market using 2022 ILOSTAT data, published with the Osservatorio delle Libere Professioni, Rome. # Understanding Kenya's Workforce: Employment Types, Sectors, and Gender Disparities ## The question behind the work This piece came out of a two-month placement with the Osservatorio delle Libere Professioni in Rome, through the Friendship Italia-Kenya project backed by Aprinternational, Confprofessioni, and the Kenyan Ministry of Labor. Brenda Chao Mbogho and I were asked to examine Kenya's labour market and make its structure legible to an Italian research audience that had the data but needed the local context to interpret it correctly. The starting question was simple. Behind the headline employment numbers, where do men and women in Kenya actually work, and how differently do their paths through the labour market look. ## What we did We worked with 2022 ILOSTAT data covering Kenya's working-age population (aged 15 to 64) and built the analysis around employment status, occupation type, and sectoral composition, split by gender at every stage. - Compared employment, unemployment, and inactivity rates by gender, and traced the gap in inactivity back to unpaid care work and cultural constraints, giving the statistic a clear explanation - Broke the employed population down into employees, self-employed, and unclassified workers, since separating these categories reveals where formal job security actually sits - Disaggregated self-employment by sector and by gender, to show which sectors absorb most of the female workforce and which stay overwhelmingly male - Built the visualisations in Datawrapper alongside the written analysis, so a reader could move between the chart and the explanation while keeping the thread [Link to the published article: osservatoriolibereprofessio…] ## What we found Kenya's labour market runs on self-employment far more than wage work, and that reliance falls unevenly by gender. Roughly two-thirds of all employed people are self-employed, an …