By Teresa Muliro, Founder, Dear Black Girl Movement

In East Africa, we have learned to praise women in ways that often hide the truth.

We call her strong when she wakes before dawn, prepares children for school, works a full day, returns home to cook, care for relatives, manage family conflicts, and somehow still smile. We celebrate her resilience when she survives unemployment, violence, heartbreak, debt, and disappointment. We admire her sacrifice when her salary educates siblings, pays medical bills for relatives, supports aging parents, and keeps entire households afloat.

But there is a question we rarely ask: What if the problem is not that East African women are strong enough, but that our societies have become dependent on their unpaid and unrecognized labor?

From Kampala to Kisumu, from Gulu to Mombasa, women are the invisible infrastructure of our economies. They grow food, trade in markets, run small businesses, care for children, nurse the sick, and hold communities together during political and economic crises. Yet much of this labor is not counted, not paid, and not protected. According to the International Labour Organization, women in Africa perform several times more unpaid care work than men. If this work were assigned a monetary value, it would amount to a massive contribution to national economies.

This is not merely a gender issue. It is an economic issue.

Uganda and Kenya frequently celebrate women’s entrepreneurship. We are told that African women are among the most entrepreneurial in the world. And that is true. Walk through Owino Market, Kalerwe, Gikomba, or Kongowea and you will find women creating value with astonishing creativity. Yet the same women struggle to access affordable credit, formal markets, land ownership, and investment capital. Female-led businesses receive only a tiny fraction of venture funding on the continent. We applaud women for starting businesses while building financial systems that make scaling those businesses extraordinarily difficult.

Education tells a similar story.

For many girls in Uganda and Kenya, a degree is presented as the ultimate escape from poverty. Families make enormous sacrifices to educate daughters. But after graduation, many young women enter labor markets marked by underemployment, low wages, and precarious work. At the same time, they are expected to support extended families, contribute to household expenses, and delay their own financial security. The result is what many first-generation professional women know intimately: achievement without accumulation. The degree opens the door, but debt, obligation, and unequal opportunity keep wealth out of reach.

And then there is the silence around mental health.

The most dangerous stereotype in our communities is not that women are weak. It is that they are supposed to endure. The “Strong Black Woman” archetype has become a cultural prison. Women are expected to absorb stress without complaint, survive violence without breaking, and carry grief without rest. In countries where mental health services are already severely limited, this expectation becomes deadly. Burnout, anxiety, depression, and emotional exhaustion are often hidden behind productivity and politeness. We praise women for coping when we should be asking why they are forced to cope with so much.

Political representation, while important, is also not enough.

Uganda has made gains in women’s representation through affirmative action. Kenya’s Constitution enshrines gender principles. Across Africa, we increasingly see women in parliaments, cabinets, and public institutions. But presence is not the same as power. Who controls budgets? Who makes security decisions? Who shapes economic policy? Who decides how land, resources, and public investment are distributed? Too often, women are invited into rooms whose architecture was designed without them. Real equality begins when women are not merely seated at the table, but are helping design the table itself.

For girls, the realities are even harsher.

In many communities across northern Uganda, eastern Uganda, and parts of rural Kenya, girls still face child marriage, school dropout, transactional sex driven by poverty, digital exploitation, and gender-based violence. We cannot discuss women’s empowerment while girls are being pushed out of education by hunger, pregnancy, or violence. The future of East Africa is being negotiated in the lives of adolescent girls long before it appears in national development plans.

So what must change?

First, we must stop romanticizing sacrifice. A society that depends on women’s exhaustion is not a resilient society; it is a society consuming its caregivers.

Second, governments must treat care work as infrastructure. Childcare, maternal health, elder care, water access, and safe transport are not social luxuries. They are economic investments.

Third, financial systems must move beyond micro-survival. Women need access to land rights, affordable credit, procurement opportunities, digital markets, and growth capital.

Fourth, mental health must be integrated into community health, schools, workplaces, and programs serving women and girls. Rest is not a reward for finishing everything; it is a human right.

Finally, East African women must own the narrative. For too long, data about women has been collected without women shaping the questions, interpreting the findings, or designing the solutions. We are not merely beneficiaries of development. We are architects of it.

The Dear Black Girl Movement was born from a simple but radical belief: validation is the beginning of transformation. When women name the burden, the burnout, the unpaid labor, the interrupted dreams, and the invisible expectations, they are not complaining. They are producing political knowledge.

The real story of East African women is not that they are endlessly strong.

It is that they have been carrying families, communities, and economies for generations, often without rest, recognition, or real power.

And the question before Uganda, Kenya, and the region is no longer whether women can carry more.

It is whether our societies are finally ready to carry their fair share.

Teresa Muliro is the Founder of Dear Black Girl Movement