When I moved to South Africa in 2021, the country ranked among the deadliest places in the world to be a woman. With one of the highest femicide rates globally, the government of South Africa had declared a femicide crisis at the end of 2019. At the time of the declaration, press coverage was dominated by the rape and murder of 19-year-old university student Uyinene Mrwetyana, who was killed during a visit to the post office by postal worker Luyanda Botha.

Data from the South African Police Service for 2018/2019 would later show that one woman was murdered every three hours. Worried about my safety, a friend in Nairobi offered to move me down: “Just for a few weeks,” she reasoned, “till you get settled in.”

Four years on, I am back in Kenya, where an unfolding femicide crisis is also breaking through the international news cycle. A friend tells me about a female colleague in Switzerland, a mid-career professional, who was considering a move to Nairobi but is having second thoughts: the country is not a safe place for women, headlines say.

Judy Ngina, a gender scholar at Johns Hopkins University in the US, is leading a pilot study on femicide in Kenya and Tanzania. Her study focuses on identifying gaps in existing laws, challenges in prosecution, and obstacles survivors face in seeking justice. “It’s actually more than one woman a day,” she says.“But you can’t count ‘point people,’ so the findings have to say ‘one woman is killed a day.’”

Because of a lack of centralized data, there are varying statistics on the rate of femicide in Kenya, but all of them paint a bloody picture. According to media coverage, an April 2025 report by Kenya’s National Police Service (NPS) showed an average of 44 women are killed each month in the country—more than one each day. The NPS report, delivered to a recently commissioned 42-member presidential task force on gender-based violence (GBV), also recorded 129 women and girls, ranging from babies to the elderly, killed in the first three months of 2025.

For context, there were 127 reported femicides in all of 2024. Although Kenya does not collect data on femicide as a distinct crime, the NPS data found that 60 % of reported killings of women and girls were committed by family members, and the majority of these killings took place in the victim’s home. Public spaces are the second most common locations, accounting for 20% of cases. This is slightly higher than isolated areas, which account for 15% of all killings. Without a doubt, “this violence now resembles a country at war against its women,” with battle lines drawn across homes and streets.

“It is scary being a woman in Kenya right now,” Ngina explains. “While the majority of reported cases of femicide are by partners, we’re also seeing an increasing feeling of lack of safety, even in public spaces.”

While femicide, the murder of women or girls because of their gender, is the penultimate act of violence rendered against them, a rise in femicide often coincides with a rise in the normalization of other forms of violence against women, including sexual harassment, rape, and online gender-based violence. “Femicide is often not the first instance of violence,” Ngina says. “If we discourage reporting, then these incidences build up to femicide.”

Ngina also recounts the recent incident of a young woman drugged and assaulted on a bus while traveling from Nairobi to Mombasa. When she woke up disoriented in a hospital, duty bearers, including nurses, tried to dissuade the young woman from reporting the case.

A long list of government bodies and abbreviations

Following immense lobbying from civil society and feminist groups organizing under the banner #EndFemicideKE, President William Ruto’s technical working group on GBV was announced 13 months after Kenyan women and their allies took to the streets demanding urgent action on femicide. The January 2024 marches, which took place in the wake of the brutal murders of 20-year-old Rita Waeni and 26-year-old Starlet Wahu in short-term rentals in Nairobi, called on the Kenyan government to declare femicide a National Emergency—a designation that would compel the executive branch to launch an immediate, coordinated response, allocate emergency funding, and issue directives to interior, health, justice, and education ministries to address the crisis with urgency.

Instead, the presidential technical working group joins a long list of government bodies and abbreviations tasked with reducing GBV in the country. These include the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions (ODPP), the Ministry of Gender and Affirmative Action, the National Gender Sector Working Group Committee on Gender Based Violence, the Directorate of Gender-Based Violence Mitigation, the National Crime Research Centre, and the National Policy for Prevention and Response to Gender Based Violence. In reality, there is no shortage of good ideas for curbing femicide or GBV in Kenya; what Kenyan women lack are good faith actors.

For this story, I spoke to another researcher, Pendo,* who asked not to be named. She explains that as early as November 2020, eight months into the pandemic, researchers, policy makers and civil society actors were tracking a second pandemic; the hidden or “shadow pandemic,” as UN Women called it, was affecting girls and women, and all types of gendered violence, especially cases of domestic violence, were on the rise.

Escalating patterns of violence, resulting from stay-at-home orders and the psychological stress of the pandemic, made it worryingly clear that home is often the most dangerous place for girls and women. Responding to this shadow pandemic, Pendo explained that a coalition of NGOs and human rights organisations partnered with Kenya’s State Department for Gender to propose an initiative that would improve data collection and sharing on GBV. The information sharing network would provide real-time data tracking of incidents of GBV, the victims, and, importantly, the perpetrators; “without data, it’s just a narrative,” says Pendo, who was part of the consortium.

If it had been successful, the project at the State Department would have significantly strengthened Kenya’s fragmented system for reporting and tracking GBV. Currently, reporting is spread across multiple institutions collecting both administrative and private data, including the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics, the Federation of Women Lawyers in Kenya, the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions, the National Gender and Equality Commission, the Directorate of Criminal Investigation, the United Nations Population Fund, UN Women and Healthcare assistance Kenya 1195. This limits how widely data is shared or used, while hindering a coordinated national response. The proposed data collection and analysis system would be built to identify and address constraints in “responding to gender based violence at the individual, institutional, and community levels.”

Pendo adds that “It’s really hard to track cases from the time they’re reported all through the courts.” Currently, if a woman shows up at a police station to report GBV, and she is lucky to find a sympathetic police officer or a dedicated gender desk, her report is taken by hand and placed in a file at the station. When survivors must present themselves in person at a police station, knowing that their account will be handwritten and stored in a public building, the risks of exposure, reprisal, or interference in the case feel especially acute. Handwritten reports like this one are then accumulated at the local police station before being delivered to the ODPP in Nairobi, which maintains a national database of crimes. Access to this database is not made public, except in annual reports from the ODPP, which do not identify perpetrators, leading some to ask: “Where are the killers?”

Had the COVID-era project been successful, there would be four years of centralized data to inform policy making on a national femicide crisis. Whether because of a lack of political will or competing funding priorities, the project at the State Department failed to take off, and in the absence of a national emergency declaration, Pendo explains, the State Department lacks the funds to run these kinds of programs on its own, “which means we’re reliant on the Bill and Melinda Gates’ of the world.”

Increasing data sharing and analysis on GBV and femicide is incredibly low-hanging fruit for good-faith actors within government. Such a database would help identify patterns of violence and repeat offenders who are likely to escalate to femicide, helping keep women safe and alive. Analysis of GBV and femicide statistics would also provide insights into an understudied policy issue, supporting actors in the space to better monitor and inform their interventions.

Although a centralized national database remains in the pipeline, we already have enough data to act on. With 60% of femicides globally carried out in the home and, crucially, by family members and intimate partners, addressing Kenya’s femicide crisis also means confronting the family as a site of violence. Policing and judicial systems are insufficient in meeting the challenge of making our homes safe spaces for women and girls. To rely on them– solely or primarily–is to abdicate responsibility and blindly deny the work required to build and nurture safe, healthy, and conducive home environments in patriarchal societies.

As Andrea Smith writes in The Revolution Starts at Home: “The question is not whether a survivor should call the police, but rather why we have given survivors no other option but to call the police.”

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