When Empowerment Becomes a Burden Rethinking Women’s Leadership in Arid and Semi-Arid Lands (ASALs)

Context and culture complicates this further. What works in Garissa County might not in Turkana County. Religion, culture, workload, masculinity and femininity all shape how women participate. In some counties, men support women’s participation but resist them becoming chairpersons, describing such roles as too public or too exposed. Strikingly, many women agree. The barrier is not always outright denial; often, it comes wrapped in care.

Even practices that outsiders quickly dismiss often hold different meanings locally. For example, the expectation that a woman consults her husband before attending a meeting can easily be read as control. Yet many women describe it as respect, a way of maintaining harmony at home and avoiding conflict. These nuances are often missed when empowerment is defined only through external lenses.

Arab gender researcher Frida D captured it well: “If we empower women to work outside the house without expecting men to work inside the house—then we aren’t empowering women. We’re exploiting them”. This paradox is undeniable in ASAL communities: women are pushed into public leadership, while men’s household roles remain unchanged. We ask women to stretch further while leaving existing burdens intact. The result is not empowerment, but exploitation dressed up as progress.

The same pattern emerges among women in leadership within corporate and professional spaces. They are expected to excel professionally while still managing most domestic and care duties at home. In Kenya, women spend an average of five hours a day on unpaid care work, compared to about one hour for men a gap that persists even in cities. This imbalance reinforces unequal gender roles and often leads to burnout and emotional strain, reminding us that true gender equality in leadership must begin with rethinking how care and work are valued, both in boardrooms and in homes.

This is where many well-intentioned strategies fall short. Gender is not universal. It does not mean the same thing everywhere. Women’s experiences in ASALs are shaped by the intersection of gender with poverty, religion, geography, age, culture, and education. Lifting strategies from one context and dropping them into another ignores these realities and risks reinforcing stereotypes instead of transforming them.

That’s why I worry when gender equality becomes reduced to a donor/inclusion checklist. Are women on the committee? Gender strategy drafted? Box ticked. On paper, women are listed as chairpersons, treasurers, or secretaries. But does holding a title automatically translate into influence? Does being called “chairperson” mean her priorities are acted upon? Too often, the paperwork changes, but women’s daily realities do not.

Empowerment cannot be measured by numbers alone. True progress means shifting the conditions around women’s lives, reducing the weight of unpaid care, budgeting for childcare, engaging men in household responsibilities, and creating leadership spaces that women can enter with dignity rather than exhaustion.

If gender equality is to mean more than box-ticking, we must stop counting seats and start changing systems. Empowerment must reflect women’s realities, respect cultural and religious nuance, and ensure that leadership is not just another burden. Only then will leadership in ASALs move from obligation to genuine choice.

I believe in an egalitarian society. But it’s time we pause and reflect on what gender, empowerment, and women’s leadership really mean in ASAL communities. Too often, efforts slip into tokenism, it is a system where women’s voices shape decisions as much as men’s, without penalty for their multiple roles. It requires reimagining leadership in ways that are rooted in context and care.

Perhaps the step we miss most often is also the simplest: asking women themselves what leadership means to them, and how they want to play that role. Empowerment should not be about fitting women into pre-set structures but about meeting them where they are and creating space on their own terms. Without this shift, we risk staying busy talking about women’s voices and leadership without ever moving the needle. Until leadership is a choice women can embrace with dignity, empowerment will remain a burden disguised as progress.