Gendered safety concerns and urban tourism participation in tourism cities in Kenya: documentary evidence from Nairobi and Mombasa cities

At the heart of urban tourism lies a paradox, safety is core, yet it is never experienced evenly. In practice, risks are patterned along the lines of gender, race, age, place, time of day, and the social meanings embedded to public spaces. The study employs a documentary, cross-source comparative design to examine gendered safety conditions shaping urban tourism participation in Nairobi and Mombasa, Kenya’s two premier tourism cities. Data was analysed from four secondary sources: Kenya Demographic and Health Survey (KDHS) 2022 indicators of physical and sexual violence prevalences, Afrobarometer Round 9 city-by-sex measures of perceived insecurity, the National Crime Research Centre (NCRC) crime-prevalence indicators, and Tourism Research Institute (TRI) tourism-city scale proxies. The analysis was mainly descriptive and comparative, but also an inferential extension through pooled city rates, difference-in-proportions tests, and risk ratios. The findings reveal disparate gendered safety risk profiles across the two cities. Nairobi recorded a more pronounced gender-specific violence burden as per the KDHS indicators, while Mombasa recorded higher perceived insecurity and elevated robbery/mugging prevalence. Inferential comparison further revealed that the most pronounced differences between the two cities emerged in repeated or persistent insecurity. More broadly, the study suggests that tourism-city competitiveness and inclusion depend on whether urban environments feel safe, navigable, and socially accessible. The study makes a distinctive contribution by moving beyond gender-neutrality in urban tourism safety and underscores the need for destination-tailored safety governance. Strengthening gender-responsive safety in urban tourism precincts is key to building more inclusive, competitive, and sustainable tourism cities.