A Ugandan woman has revealed that her Kenyan husband pays her to stay home, take care of the kids and do domestic chores.
The woman narrated how she was able to save some of the monthly salary she gets from her husband, which she then used to open her now-flourishing business.
This comes after a Kenyan High Court judge ruled that being a housewife is payable work.
The Ugandan wife known as Flo wife who spoke to Kenyan media, revealed that she married her husband in 2006, but being that she was a foreigner in Kenya, it was difficult to secure a white-collar job, alluding to discrimination in the hiring process.
“Sometimes I would be qualified until they saw my passport during the in-person interview. One HR manager once asked ‘you expect to find a job as a foreigner?’” she said.
She would thus try her luck in self-employment; she reckons that a boutique she had in Eastleigh actually did well, but unfortunately, the 2017 election chaos in the area destabilised her establishment leading to its closure.
Deciding to be a housewife after the shutdown of her boutique, the mother of three spent all her days at home and she noticed that she was doing most of the domestic work even with a househelp available.
“Though we had a househelp, I would find myself doing almost everything, especially for the kids because they would come to me and not our help,” she said.
And this is when the married woman hatched her new plan which was to get her husband to fire the maid and become a fully-paid housewife who would ensure the household is up and running.
Her husband paid her KSh 8,000 without fail for her job as a housewife.
At first, she recalls her husband’s first reaction when she asked for payment to do chores and take care of the kids was, ‘are you kidding me?’ look.
But after listening to her, he actually agreed that the salary the househelp was being paid should be given to her.
“I asked him why he could not pay me yet he was okay with paying a house girl. I initially wanted KSh 10,000 (N37,000) a month but my husband bargained and we settled on KSh 8,000 (N29,000),” she said.
Each month, her husband, whom she also said was her boss back then, would remit KSh 8,000 (N29,000) without fail to Flo’s Mpesa.
Flo would seldom spend the KSh 8,000 (N29,000) monthly salary from her job as a housewife and so after months of saving, she decided to buy an oven, get baking training and this was how her business Floraghecakes was born.
Though she still bakes at home and does deliveries, she has made some great strides and one of her proudest moments was when she was contracted by second lady Mama Rachel Ruto’s team to bake a cake for them for their first cycling anniversary.
She hopes she could get more capital and expand her business to a big bakery as she still bakes at home.
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