The Women’s and Adolescent Health Rights program was initiated five years ago in Baringo County, Kenya. In collaboration with the Ministry of Health and the Ministry of Education of the region, Mundo Posible developed a capacity-building program in menstrual, sexual, and reproductive health rights in the region’s public primary and secondary schools. This program was specially focused on schools with a student population from the Ilchamus ethnic minority. Over these years, the program has been implemented in many public schools...
The women of the Network for Empowerment of Women (NEW) in Baringo County hail from various regions within Baringo South sub-county. They serve as leaders of Ilchamus women’s groups, voluntary associations comprising 20 to 30 women who come together to engage in diverse income-generating activities. Traditionally, Ilchamus women are expected to stay at home, caring for the family and livestock, which is an exceptionally arduous task in the semi-arid region where water is scarce and must be manually transported in...
How is life in your community? Which are the main challenges faced by women here? We asked these questions to Salina, who lives in a rural distant community in Baringo county, Kenya, when we went to visit her women group for the first time a few months ago. “A woman is overworked at home, she wakes up early and sleeps late, everything depends on her. Life here is very hard. We have scarcity of water. The father has got no activities...
It was one of the hottest days of the drought season in Baringo, Kenya, when Christie-Lee and her daughter Coco came with us to one of the training sessions for the rural women groups in Baringo. This was going to be the third session with two rural women groups from Kailer region, who have joined together the program of The Little Big Project Kenya, to receive several sessions in menstrual, sexual and reproductive health rights and income generating activities. Previously,...
It is 9 am in the morning and the sun is already hot in Baringo, Kenya. We are all in the car, fully parked with the Mundo Posible equipment that we use for the training sessions. One of the directors from the schools in the location we are heading to is in the car with us, and we are all enjoying a hearty conversation in our different languages. Some are speaking in English, some Swahili and others Ilchamus, as we...
For decades, sexual and reproductive health (SRH) education has concentrated on training the girl child to empower them. However, one of the hardships faced by girls and women in general in a patriarchal society is the lack of equally educated boys/ men in society. Having boys/men who are not educated makes it challenging to achieve meaningful strides in the fight for equal opportunity among boys and girls in vulnerable communities. When we began sexual and reproductive health education, we focused on...
INFORMATION IS POWER Information is power. During our weekly meetings with rural women in vulnerable communities, we have heard the story of what they did when they were young, and usually the cause of the mistake was lack of information. Information is a crucial aspect in our daily to day decision making. In Baringo county, most girls and women do not have any access to sexual education. Early marriage and early pregnancies are not something that used to happened in the past,...
It is six’o clock in the morning and the sun is rising in the horizon. We are starting our trip to a region in Baringo where Internal Displaced People (IDPs) live since 2013, when they were located there because of the water rising of Lake Baringo. We meet a women group composed by 30 members, they are Ilchamus, a minority ethnic group part of the bigger Maasai ethnic group, who live around Lake Baringo, in Baringo county, Kenya. As part of...