TAITA TAVETA, Kenya — The Kenyan government has begun documenting Tanzanian women married to Kenyan men in Taita Taveta County, a move aimed at issuing them with national identity cards and easing access to basic services.
Josephine Onunga, the Taita Taveta County Commissioner, said on Wednesday that officers from the National Government Administration and the Immigration Department had launched the process to formally recognise the women, many of whom have lived in Kenya for decades.
“There are many cross-border marriages that have been taking place in the county that borders Tanzania,” Ms. Onunga said during an address in Voi town. “We are working on programmes to make sure that foreign women are documented.”
In Taveta Sub-County, local officials say the number of Tanzanian women married to Kenyan men has steadily increased. Kitobo Location Chief Yunis Jureji noted that over 500 women in his area alone fall into this category. “Some of these women were married at a very young age,” he said.
Many of the women say they have faced long-standing difficulties accessing services such as healthcare, mobile money, and government loans due to their lack of proper identification. Some have lived in Kenya for as long as 40 years. Their children and grandchildren are Kenyan by birth, but the women themselves remain undocumented.
Last year, several women took their complaints to the county government, saying they had been repeatedly denied IDs due to the absence of a certificate of registration a key document for citizenship processing.
Joseph Mwandoto, a resident of Mwatate, voiced frustration on behalf of his wife. “We have grandchildren with my Tanzanian wife, who is still not registered. We have constantly been trying to register her in vain,” he said.
Former Taita Taveta Deputy Governor Majala Mlagui has also urged the national government to support and formally recognise foreign marriages in the region.
Meanwhile, members of the Pare community an ethnic group living along the Kenya–Tanzania border have petitioned the government to be recognised as an official Kenyan tribe. The group, estimated at around 15,000 people in the country, says it has deep roots in the region and deserves formal inclusion.
Rama Lukindo, the community’s chairperson, said the lack of official recognition had denied them full participation in national matters.
For many affected families, the new registration initiative brings long-awaited hope.
“We cannot fully participate in building the economy because we lack the relevant documents,” one Tanzanian woman told local officials during a recent outreach event. “We cannot even access simple services like M-Pesa or register in women’s groups.”
If successful, the process could allow hundreds possibly thousands of women in Taita Taveta and other border areas to receive identity cards for the first time and be recognised as part of the Kenyan social and economic fabric.
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