Further, over 85 per cent of all rural women contribute to sustainable national development through their work as small-scale farmers, providing the bulk of the Kenya's food supply. Women's role as the gatekeepers to family and child welfare is also a common knowledge in Kenya. Moreover, research have shown that the forest is central to lives of rural women in Africa, and hence, they play a major and critical role in conserving this storehouse. In addition, the time spent in forests, gathering woodfuel and carry its water, has taught women the many uses of forest resources, including providing fibres for cloth, mat-making and basketry. Many indigenous forest resources are used as a source of food offering vegetables, nut fruits and even vines.
Women also know the uses of traditional medicinal resources of various plants.
Hence, their role as managers and caretaker of the environment, community forest, and its biodiversity is an acknowledged phenomenon in a nutcell, women are expert on their own write in sustainable human and ecosystems management. As such they are keenly aware of the connections between local poverty, the lack of available and affordable technologies, and the problems of environmental destruction. Paradoxically, however, women are rarely integrated as partners in the design, management and follow-up of development programs, and there lies the gap the missing link. They are usually systematically excluded from access to land, credit and formal training on skills and technologies that could eventually lead to easing of their daily workloads. Other factors include conflicting difficulties influenced by socio-political and outdated traditional cultural practices which increasingly impoverishes them many wives have the status of perpetual minor or otherwise merely seen as provider of social security and producers of the future labour force.