IT education and workforce participation: a new era for women in Kenya?," The Information Society (23:1) 2007

While Sub-Saharan African women have historically assumed the roles of both housewives and subsistence farmers, they have had few opportunities to participate in the modern economies of the re-gion. However, this trend is changing with the exponential growth of information and communications technologies (ICT), giving many Sub-Sahara African women access to computers, the Internet, and other related technologies. Based on the work of a four-member research team from Kenya and the United States, this article exam-ines the integration of female college students into the formal ICT work sector in Kenya. We do so by examining major bottlenecks and enablers to such integration from historical and contemporary perspectives. Using an interpretive approach, we conducted 32 in-terviews with women in an ICT program offered by a university in Kenya. Our findings indicate that women were highly optimistic, embracing ICT as a practical mechanism for achieving entry into the labor market. However, they perceived significant structural barriers, such as public policies that failed to facilitate the develop