This book examines the legal, administrative, and regulatory barriers that are preventing women in Kenya from contributing fully to the Kenyan economy. Building on the 2004 FIAS Improving the Commercial Legal Framework and Removing Administrative and Regulatory Barriers to Investment report, this study looks at the bureaucratic barriers facing women in Kenya through a gender lens.

Men and women both play significant, though different, economic roles in Uganda (both contribute around 50% of GDP and women are 39% of business owners). Gender inequality in access to and control of productive assets and resources acts as a brake to women's economic participation and limits economic growth. Labor and time constraints differentially affect women's and men's capacity to engage in business activity, with significant consequences for agricultural productivity in the context of strategic exports. It is therefore important for Uganda to unleash the full productive potential of fema.

For women in Ghana and Uganda, nonfarm activities play an important role in yielding the lowest - and the most rapidly declining - rural poverty rates. In both countries rural poverty declined fastest for female heads of household engaged in nonfarm work (which tended to be a secondary activity). But patterns vary between the two countires.