Efforts geared towards supporting gender equality in Nakuru county have attained minimum if not zero achievement because the people who are meant to support and advocate for it seem not to be concerned. This was said on Thursday at a Nakuru hotel during a stakeholder's consultative forum converged by the National Gender and Equality Commission (NGEC) South Rift region where a majority of the participants wondered why women in Nakuru continued to play second fiddle to men despite enjoying massive representation in different key departments.
NGEC South Rift coordinator George Wanyonyi noted that the office was doing a lot in ensuring that women were aware of their rights but lacked support from those in power.
"We all know that politicians are perceived as opinion leaders in our societies and tend to move crowds but our women leaders here are totally not concerned about their fellow women's grievances," he said while giving an example of recent prostitutes deaths whereby no woman leader has openly come out to support the estranged group apart from the Nakuru women representative who spoke about the issue once and went mum.
"Gender equality comes at a cost and if our women in authority don't want to support our efforts, we are fighting a losing battle because the fact is that we live in a male dominated world," Wanyonyi said.
The forum that brought together youths, Non-Governmental organisations (NGO), Community Based Organisations (CBO), journalists, corporates, institutions and representatives from both the national and county governments was also used to formulate the 2016 calendar of events for the larger South Rift region.