ABSTRACT

While achieving ‘gender equity’ is much lauded as an international development goal, the complexities and inherent tensions underscoring this objective are not often discussed, especially by the development practitioners tasked with ‘implementing’ it. In the case of livestock interventions, those seeking to implement gender equity perceive themselves as challenging modes of patriarchy that commonly disenfranchise women in achieving fair benefits from livestock production. At the same time, their development solutions to this “gender problem” are generally paternalistic, in that they effectively eschew the complexity behind culturally contingent systems of gender relations, instead relying on exogenous notions of what constitutes ‘gender equity.’ This book chapter explores this push-pull dynamic of being “caught between patriarchy and paternalism” using critical feminist analysis and reflection drawn from a qualitative systems analysis of the Kenyan dairy sector.

Results indicate that the practice of implementing gender equity across a spectrum of interventions aimed at improving women’s access to milk markets, participation in dairy-based co-operatives, and intrahousehold benefit sharing, were complicated by embedded cultural norms that mediate localized systems of gender, livestock, and market relationships. The resultant disconnect in visions of gender equity between development practitioners, dairy management, and farmers highlights the challenges in reconciling these perspectives in implementing interventions aimed at reducing gender inequalities.