Addressing Sexuality in Kenya’s Population Policy: Contending Discourses of Fertility Change

The need to address sexuality in population policy is increasingly being recognised in academic and policy circles as a way of addressing contemporary demographic concerns such as HIV/AIDS, sexual violence as well as ethics issues which go beyond the control of numbers of people. In Kenya, as well as most other countries in the developing World, population policies were initially informed by the discourse of population control, which is now rivalled by the reproductive rights discourse that is embedded in the realm of understanding human sexuality. The preamble of this study gives an account of how Kenya came to adopt a population policy. To answer the central question for this study which is what the implications of the dominance of the discourse of population control for fertility policies are, Kenya’s population policy documents are discourse analysed. The analysis using a political economy of fertility framework shows that Kenya’s population policy is a catching up one, in which significant historical factors that have a bearing on fertility change have been ignored, and what is now called a ‘stalling and stagnating’ fertility transition is a frame that ignores regional differences and is not focused on developing female agency. Using a reproductive rights lens, Kenya’s population is commendable in that it does not include incentives or disincentives as catalyst towards meeting policy goals. However, it puts the sexual and reproductive rights of some members ahead of others and fails to address economic inequalities, is high on target setting and most of all it does not address sexuality. This paper argues that if the population policy in Kenya is informed by reproductive rights, the ideals of the ICPD to help men and women achieve highest possible sexual and reproductive health will be met. There will also be a reduction in fertility when women can access information and services, even though this should not be the overriding goal as it is under the population control ideology. Relevance to development studies: The existing disparity in aggregate fertility rates in developed and developing countries have in some quarters led to the assumption that fertility levels are one of the causes of underdevelopment. However, away from this economic thinking is human centered development, which puts emphasis human lives. The two opposed discourses of population policy: population control with an economic argument versus reproductive rights that sees human beings as both the means and the end of development, are integral parts of the debates about the nexus between population and development.