Women in Kenya’s Music Industry, Staying Safe

When Kenyan singer-songwriter Karun opened Embe Studio in Nairobi, she was building the kind of space she wished had existed when she was starting out.

“I found myself in so many unsafe situations just having to rely on other people to record,” she tells OkayAfrica, reflecting on the early period of her career. Many of the studios were in men’s homes or bedrooms, where comfort and safety could quickly give way to something more precarious.

"If you bring in a young girl there at night, that could end up in a really unsafe situation,” she says.  That is why she opened her own studio: “It’s a neutral space. It’s not someone’s house, and there are other creatives around.”

In Kenya and across East Africa, women in music say safety is too often treated as something they must figure out for themselves. Their concerns go beyond physical risk to include emotional strain, creative control, financial exploitation, and the everyday calculations required to move through male-dominated spaces with too few clear rules. Across interviews conducted on- and off-the-record, one truth came up again and again: women are still being forced to build the protections the industry has yet to provide.

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