'Caring for older women in Kenya's plural legal system'

Presentations by Professor Ann Stewart, Warwick Law School; Dr Jenny Lander, Early Career Fellow, Warwick Institute of Advanced Study; David Ngira Otieno, Mount Kenya Law School Nairobi.

The research assesses the contribution of community-based ‘woman to woman’ marriage practices in Kenya to the provision of care, particularly for older people, when there is little social welfare available. The everyday practices of caring for older people particularly women, traditionally woven into communal relations, are changing in the socioeconomic and political circumstances of contemporary Kenya. Are woman to woman marriages, understood within ethnographic and anthropological discourse as a means of tackling infertility, evolving into a way of recognising and ‘rewarding’ caring labour for those with assets? How are claims for recognition of the caring labour provided in these practices understood now in the ‘formal’ courts and within community dispute resolution practices? Are women carers rewarded as wives and mothers via bequeathable wealth or remunerated as paid domestic workers?

The papers address a range of facets to the research.