Forum demands end to sexual harassment in matatus

Women have called for an end to sexual harassment in public transport, saying it is inhibiting their access to economic opportunities.

They spoke on Wednesday at a hybrid women and transport annual conference in Nairobi convened by Flone Initiative.

World Bank senior gender and transport specialist, Karla Dominguez Gonzalez, citing study findings, said unsafe and unreliable public transport has forced women to opt to work in low-income areas where they don’t commute, yet they would access better economic opportunities in high-income central business districts.

She referred to a World Bank's study on women’s mobility in Latin American cities that found that women preferred informal businesses closer to their homes to central business districts where they would be better paid, because of unsafe and unreliable public transport, compounded by the burden of unpaid care and domestic work.

She said sexual harassment of women in public transport and spaces is a major hindrance to their economic empowerment.

“A study from the International Labour Organisation reveals that limited access to safe transportation is estimated to be the greatest obstacle to women’s participation in labour market in developing countries,” she said.

Forms of abuse

A 2021 Women and Public Transport East Africa study by UN Women established a high prevalence of verbal, sexual and emotional abuse in Kenyan public transport.

It sampled 2,484 women in Nairobi, out of which 50 per cent reported using public transport, with 14-59 passenger vehicles being the most frequently used.

The 82.9 per cent reported to have been victims of verbal, sexual and emotional abuse, with conductors (72.7 per cent) being the leading perpetrators, followed by touts (8.5 per cent) and drivers (8.2 per cent).

The report noted that these forms of harassment consequently prevented women from accessing and fully exploiting economic opportunities.

Also read: Nairobi artists using graffiti to raise GBV awareness

Of concern was that although women commuters face harassment while using public transport in Nairobi, many incidents go unreported. The Seventy-eight per cent of the respondents said they never reported to anybody.

They said they would not report to the police because they did not trust them to take any action against the perpetrators.

Of the 22 per cent of those who reported, seven per cent did so to the perpetrators’ coworkers or the Savings and Credit Cooperatives that manage the matatus. Some of them narrated their ordeals to their friends.

Solutions

To create safe spaces in the Kenyan public sector, Flone Initiative has since its registration in 2013 trained more than 2,000 transport workers in public safety, its founder Naomi Mwaura said, further calling for a concerted effort to end sexual harassment.

Meanwhile, Ms Gonzalez said public transport systems have to be designed in a manner that takes into account women’s time poverty factor owing to their primary care roles and domestic work.

“Women rely more on public transport and even though they constitute half of the population around the world, public transport is designed around one-stop trip from home to central business district for longer distances, with a strong focus on efficiency of transport during rush hours which are characteristic of men’s travel behaviours,” she said.

On the other hand, women make multiple short trips at off-peak hours to socioeconomic facilities.

“Creating and implementing mobility solutions of today and tomorrow requires that we understand and address the diverse needs of our society-putting special attention to the priority needs of our women and girls (to enable them) achieve maximum economic gains,” she said.

[email protected]