The pace of change: When tax injustice slows progress

This series is for those who read “Do You Pay Your Taxes?” and asked what comes next. The voices in that piece were direct: Where does our money go? Who does the system work for? Who pays the price when it doesn’t?

This series answers those questions—one layer at a time. Each article examines a different dimension of tax justice through a feminist political economy lens. Together, they map a system designed by the powerful, for the powerful—and what it will take to change it.

Some examples repeat across pieces. This is deliberate. Mechanisms like presumptive tax, the taxation of necessities, the unpaid care economy, and the invisibility of informal workers are structural. Each return reveals another layer of how the system works.

This series focuses on women—not because they are the only ones excluded, but because their exclusion exposes the system most clearly. Women are not a single story. The market trader, the rural farmer, the woman with a disability each faces different constraints. A later piece examines these differences. Here, we begin where the pattern is sharpest: with the women whose daily contributions leave no trace.

Twenty years

From mice to a goat.

That is the pace of change. 

And it is slowed by tax injustice.

She began with nothing. Not as a figure of speech. As fact.

She was among the poorest in her community. She could not afford soap. Her clothes were so embedded with dirt that when she moved, they made a faint crackling sound—fabric stiffened by neglect, not choice.

This is where her economic life begins. Not with opportunity. With absence.

Why she never went to school

She did not go to school. The distance was too far. The cost was too high. When money was limited, choices were made.

Her brothers were sent. She stayed.

This is how trajectories are set. Early. Quietly. Permanently.

The literacy programme

Years later, she enters a literacy programme. She learns to read. To write. To count.

She joins other women. They begin with collective production—small, informal, cooperative. They produce together. They sell together. They survive together.

Over time, these groups evolve.

They become savings groups. Then savings and loans groups. ROSCAs. VSLAs.

This is where she accesses capital. Not through the state. Not through banks. Through each other.

The progression

Her first loan is small.

She buys mice—edible rats.

They multiply. She sells.

She buys chickens—local breeds.

They multiply. She sells.

She buys a pig.

It multiplies.

Eventually, she buys a goat.

This progression takes twenty years.

Growth that never leaves poverty

At every stage, she is doing what development theory prescribes. She saves. She borrows. She invests. She reinvests. She diversifies assets. She builds incrementally. She manages risk.

There is nothing inefficient about her behaviour. There is nothing irrational about her decisions.

So why does it take twenty years to move from mice to a goat?

Because the capital available to her is too small. Savings groups are critical. They are adaptive. They are often the only financial systems available to women like her. But they are structured around limitation. Loan sizes are small. Cycles are short. Risk is internal.

They enable movement. But they keep her in the same place—moving from poorest of the poor to among the poorest. From nothing to head‑loading a basket of bananas for hawking on the street. Visible enough to be counted in empowerment narratives. Invisible enough to remain uncounted, unbanked, untaxed as a recognised citizen.

Growth that never changes her position is not growth. It is survival with a label.

Where tax justice enters the story

She is not recognised as a taxpayer. She is not registered. She does not file. She does not appear in any official system as a contributor.

But she pays taxes every day.

Every time she buys soap—she pays VAT. Every time she buys salt, sugar, cooking oil—she pays VAT. Every time she buys paraffin—she pays VAT. Consumption is taxed. She consumes. So she pays.

Every time she buys sanitary towels—for herself or her daughters—she absorbs a cost that is both necessary and taxed. A reproductive tax.

Every time she seeks antenatal care, delivers a child, or pays for maternal health services, she incurs costs that function as taxation on reproduction. A maternal tax.

Every time she feeds, clothes, and sustains her family, she carries the financial weight of care—embedded in taxed goods and services. A care tax.

These are not abstract burdens. They reduce what she can save. They reduce what she can invest. They reduce the size of the loans she can take.

Tax is not just what you pay. It is what you cannot keep.

And what she cannot keep determines how fast she can grow.

The invisibility that locks her out

Because she is not recognised as a taxpayer, she cannot leverage her contribution. No tax identification. No financial footprint. No credit history.

She cannot walk into a bank and say: I am a taxpayer. I contribute. I am investable.

Because in the system’s eyes—she does not exist.

So she returns to the group. Again and again. Borrowing small. Repaying fast. Starting over.

Time becomes the cost.

What could take five years takes twenty. What could scale remains small. What could transform stabilises at survival.

Tax sets the speed limit

Her business does not fail. It does not collapse. It simply does not move fast enough to change her position within a generation.

She pushes forward. She sends her children to school. She pays fees. Buys uniforms. Covers costs. She does what was not done for her.

Every payment she makes to educate her children is made from taxed income. Every uniform, every exercise book carries VAT. Every shilling she spends to build a future for her family is a shilling that has already been reduced by the taxes she pays.

She remains confined to the informal sector. Not because she lacks capacity, but because the system has no way to recognise her. No tax identification. No credit history. No path out.

She is invisible—and because she is invisible, she continues to pay a disproportionate share of her income in taxes. VAT on everything she buys. Reproductive tax on sanitary towels. Maternal tax on health services. Care tax on everything her family needs.

The state collects. The state does not recognise. The state does not invest in her growth.

One of her children becomes a magistrate.

This is success. It is also indictment.

Because that outcome is achieved despite the system, not because of it.

She finances it herself. Through taxed consumption. Through constrained capital. Through time.

The state benefits. From the taxes she pays. From the educated citizen her investment produces. But it does not recognise her role in that production. It continues to collect her taxes, and it continues to treat her as a non‑taxpayer.

The cycle holds

She pays. But she is not seen.

And when you are not seen, you cannot move faster.

This is the pace of change. Not natural. Not inevitable. Structured.

It is structured by exclusion from education. Structured by exclusion from formal finance. Structured by taxation without recognition.

Savings groups become the bridge. But they are also the ceiling. They carry her when the system does not. But they cannot replace what the system withholds.

The question that remains

So the question is not whether she is progressing. She is.

The question is why progress takes so long.

Why does it take twenty years to move from mice to a goat?

Because every step forward is self-financed. Because every gain is taxed. Because every attempt to accelerate is constrained by lack of recognition.

Because she is inside the system as a payer—and outside it as a participant.

That contradiction has a cost. Measured in time. Measured in scale. Measured in generations.

Twenty years. From mice to a goat.

That is not just her story. It is the story of a system that extracts value faster than it enables growth.

And until that changes—the pace of change will remain exactly as it is.

Slow. Unequal. Unjust.

The next article asks: which women are we talking about? Because the woman who climbed from mice to goats is not one woman. She is many.