What Kenya’s 2025 landmark judgments reveal about marriage, money and gender
Milimani Law Courts in Nairobi. Two landmark judgments dismantled legal provisions built on outdated gender roles.
What you need to know:
- Two major court decisions in 2025 have reshaped Kenya’s family law by eliminating the dependency requirement for widowers while upholding the need for spouses to prove contribution in matrimonial property cases.
- Kenya’s courts have struck down a discriminatory inheritance provision affecting widowers but retained the requirement for spouses to prove their contribution during divorce—an approach that continues to disadvantage women, whose unpaid labour remains difficult to quantify.
Two landmark judgments dismantled legal provisions built on outdated gender roles—but exposed how far the law still has to go. A widow in Kenya has never had to prove she depended on her husband to inherit his estate. A widower, until this year, had to.
A wife seeking her share of matrimonial property must prove what she contributed—but how does she quantify the years spent raising children, managing a household, and sustaining a marriage?
These are the fault lines that two landmark court decisions in 2025 forced Kenya to confront. Together, they reset the country's family law landscape and exposed the deeply gendered assumptions that have shaped inheritance and matrimonial property rights for decades.
The decisions dismantle legal provisions built on outdated gender roles—some disadvantaging widowers, others disproportionately burdening women—offering a mixed picture of progress and persisting inequalities. The inheritance ruling: Widowers no longer need to prove dependence.
The High Court's June decision striking down Section 29(c) of the Law of Succession Act was a direct challenge to gender stereotypes embedded in inheritance law. The now-nullified section required widowers to prove financial dependence before benefiting from their wives' estates—a test that widows were never subjected to.
The judges held that this asymmetry violated Article 27 of the Constitution on equality, and Article 45(3), which guarantees equal rights for spouses before, during, and after marriage. In doing so, the court acknowledged that the law had been built on patriarchal assumptions—specifically, that men do not depend on women.
Dennis Otieno, senior legal counsel at the Federation of Women Lawyers-Kenya (Fida-Kenya), says the ruling corrects a long-standing imbalance. "Section 29(a) allowed wives to inherit without proving dependency, yet Section 29(c) forced men to prove it. That burden alone violated the principle of equality," he notes.
He clarifies that the decision affects not only widowers but also ex-husbands. The law, Dennis argues, had been shaped by an outdated assumption that men were always the primary providers. "Today, both men and women own property. The requirement that widowers and ex-husbands must prove dependency is skewed. Parliament must now amend the law to align it with the Constitution," he states.
By eliminating the dependency test, the ruling recognises the economic shifts in Kenyan households, where women increasingly contribute to—if not solely sustain—family wealth. But it also forces the country to confront uncomfortable truths: while women's rising economic power is now acknowledged by law, their structural disadvantages remain largely unaddressed.
Matrimonial property: Proving contribution is mandatory
The gendered complexity becomes clearer in the second major ruling of the year. The Court of Appeal dismissed Fida-Kenya's attempt to overturn Section 7 of the Matrimonial Property Act, which requires spouses to demonstrate their contribution—monetary or non-monetary—before assets can be divided at the dissolution of a marriage.
Fida-Kenya argued that the provision disadvantages women, whose contributions through childcare, domestic work, and emotional labour often remain invisible and difficult to prove. The appellate judges upheld the High Court's earlier position, reaffirming that Section 7 is constitutional. "It may be easier to produce bank statements to prove monetary contribution than to demonstrate non-monetary contribution. However, courts are equipped to assess the credibility of all forms of evidence," they noted.
While seemingly balanced, the ruling leaves women navigating a system that still undervalues their unpaid labour—even as it acknowledges its existence. Dennis says the decision reinforces the principle that spouses must demonstrate what they contributed, whether financially or otherwise.
"There is a mischief where some people enter marriage to relax while others work hard, and later demand a 50:50 share. Today, both men and women work. You cannot expect an equal split without showing contribution," he emphasises.
His point, while pragmatic, underscores a gender fault line: the assumption that marriages operate on equal economic footing, when data shows that women continue to shoulder most unpaid care work.
The invisible labour problem
The tension intensifies when unpaid domestic and care work is considered. Women in Kenya perform the overwhelming bulk of this labour, yet converting it into legally recognisable "contribution" remains fraught.
Dennis acknowledges this complexity, noting that even within middle-class households where domestic workers are employed, quantifying a woman's role becomes difficult. "If a domestic manager runs the home, how does a woman quantify her contribution? Should the domestic worker's salary determine her claim? These questions are logical but very difficult to answer," he says.
He further notes that this debate mirrors middle- and upper-income realities, often leaving out women whose lives fall outside this bracket. "This is really a middle- and upper-income issue; lower-income families don't experience it the same way. It's the middle class that feels the impact most, because both parents now go to maternity and child health clinics and share responsibilities," he points out.
"That's why I tell people not to look at today's laws through the lens of your father's era—your father probably never carried you or changed your nappies. We are the ones doing that now, so the old mindset no longer applies."
The numbers that won't become a formula
Yet national statistics paint a starkly gendered picture. In November 2025, the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics reported that women perform 25.8 billion hours of unpaid domestic and care work annually—five times more than men—valued at Sh1.89 trillion of the Sh2.24 trillion total.
Even so, Dennis says these figures will not become a formula for courts. "Every household is different," he explains. "If you apply one measurement across all classes, you create confusion. Courts rely on equity, not rigid figures."
Equity, he adds, gives judges flexibility to weigh each marriage on its own terms and avoid unfair advantage to either spouse. But within this equity-based approach lies the enduring gender tension: whose labour is easiest to evidence, whose contributions remain undervalued, and whose economic vulnerabilities the law still fails to fully recognise.
