Author: Leslie Vryenhoek
To reach Ruth Otieno’s home, you must traverse dirt roads with deep, wide potholes that force traffic to weave side to side. Cows and goats graze roadside and behind them, large gardens of vegetables and maize gleam in the hot sun. After parking and walking a circuitous route to avoid the furrows (ditches) filled with water and mud, you finally arrive at her property, a small farm of modest structures made of bricks, mud, stone and corrugated metal.
Inside, the living room is cool and comfortable, with ample seating. On the coffee table in front of a wide couch, a crochet hook rests on a pile of coral pink yarn. This is Ruth’s workplace. She has long been part of a group of women who make handicrafts. When 15 of them joined together years ago to make extra income, they chose the name Tem Atema, which means “just keep trying” in the Luo language.
At first, they made decorative cushions filled with fabric scraps, which they sold in local markets and at municipal council exhibitions. Then by chance, while Ruth was selling food roadside and passing the time by crocheting, a woman stopped and asked if she would take a commission. The woman showed her a crochet pattern, and Ruth said, “Leave it with me.”
That launched Tem Atema’s new venture, crocheting unique products to sell themselves as well as taking orders as subcontracted workers.
“We started when we were young mothers. Now we are grandmothers,” she says.
But through all those years, they considered themselves housewives scrambling to make extra money, never workers. Then in 2019, WIEGO organized a meeting for women “home-based workers” Ruth laughs now, remembering, because they all thought it was to be a meeting about health workers who come into your home. It took a few hours for the concept to sink in—that home-based workers were those who make products (or deliver services) from their homes. That they were home-based workers.
For the first time Ruth and her colleagues understood that what they were doing was work—and that around the world, others like them were organizing. “Before that, no one was ever recognizing our work. No one was appreciating us,” Ruth says.
They took up mobilizing immediately, identifying other women who were home-based workers and explaining the issues to them. And they took advantage of training offered by WIEGO, learning that other unrecognized groups—domestic workers, street vendors—had organized, and how Asian home-based workers were making gains.
Even when a global pandemic arrived at the same time her area of Kisumu flooded, they persisted. “We had to walk through water to go and do a Zoom meeting,” Ruth recalls. But they were determined to maintain the momentum.
Near the end of 2020, HomeNet Kenya (HNK) was launched. It soon affiliated to HomeNet International—a place where Ruth says, “Participation is open to all of us, we all have a voice.”
However, the global pandemic continued to disrupt markets and prevent them from earning. “We needed an alternative way to earn income,” Ruth says. Their new global network gave them a forum to express that need, and their voices were heard. Support for HNK members arrived in the form of chickens first, then each cluster was supported to start a community kitchen garden. That garden grows on Ruth’s property, and she has learned how to grow the vegetables and to harvest the seeds to grow future crops. Around the other side of her house, seedling fruit trees—an orange, an avocado—wait to take root in the holes Ruth dug yesterday.
This is business diversification, Kisumu style.
Water, she says, is the biggest challenge now. While this area is prone to flooding, climate change has also brought unseasonal dry spells. Ruth has set up an irrigation system using a small rain barrel and a seepage hose, but the water runs out so fast.
Since becoming part of the home-based workers’ movement, she says, the women have been able to engage with county officials and with the department of trade. They have established their own savings and credit cooperative—Ruth is on its Advisory Committee and reports they have disbursed the first loans—and now are included in meetings of the cooperative movement in Kenya.
“As a person, I feel I’ve moved up a notch higher,” Ruth notes.
There was another benefit of being part of a global movement during a global pandemic, Ruth says with a smile: “We all learned how to do Zoom, how to raise our hand and when to mute.” It may seem a small gain, but in a place where passage from here to there is always uncertain, that technical savvy is a huge gain.
