Changing Mindsets

Our efforts are geared toward providing lasting solutions to curb hunger and poverty for good. Women living in abject poverty are equipped with skills and knowledge in income-generating activities.

For the last nine years, Compassion CBO has been bringing women together and helping them start sustainable projects for self-sustainability. Most women had endured scourging poverty. They had depended for years on handouts and begging in the streets. They lived and waited for someone somewhere to come and help them with a dream that never came to be.

Compassion CBO came in and worked to help them change their mindset.

The women discovered that they are the people; there is a problem – and they are the solution. What they needed was a paradigm shift.

It’s then that we started a micro-finance program from some hard-earned coins, and it’s with those coins that nine years later they have been able to start several projects, which earn them some money and provide food to their families. This has happened without any external funds and only through group and personal initiatives.

Those who learned skills like sewing and knitting are exemplary examples as seen in the pictures.

With small parcels of land and using roadsides reserves they are adopting small-scale farming, growing papaya (pawpaw) trees, tomatoes, and arrowroot. They have also started goat keeping, pig farming, poultry, and beekeeping. Some have been able to start grocery shops and roadside food stalls.

Many of them come from sprawling slums in Nairobi and others from remote rural areas. Several of them are living with HIV/AIDS, and many are widows, yet they have overcome all odds to tenaciously fight poverty.

If women living in abject poverty are equipped with skills and can access funds to start income-generating activities, handouts will be a thing of the past.

Tackling Exclusion, Bribery and Corruption

The government of Kenya has set out a Women Development Fund for the last 10 years, but it has proved very hard for women in poverty to access it due to corruption in accessing funds.

Women’s groups have to pay a bribe of Kes 2,000 to be trained by a government official and given the certificate of training – and there’s no guarantees that they will get the funds even after bribing.

The certificate is compulsory for a group to get funds, and some government trainees are taking advantage of that.

Furthermore, when they get the funds they are required to guarantee each other and return the money to the government with interest. Many find it hard and fear that iF they fail to pay back, their belongings will be auctioned by government officials. Some have no assets to attach to access the fund.

The poor women are left out, and only the able can access and benefit from the government loans.

Reintroducing Traditional Indigenous Food

We are now teaching women to plant and eat traditional food, which includes vegetables such as cassava and sweet potatoes, and fruit such as bananas.

We have started planting bananas both for food crop and cash crop.

This will see increase in food rations instead of relying on corn, crops of which sometimes fail completely and no harvest causes starvation. It’s hard to empower hungry people.

Empowerment starts from the home, by having access to food. Without food, all the savings go to drain and stagnate the economic development of women reversing years of progress.

“When a poor person dies of hunger, it has not happened because God did not take care of him or her. It has happened because neither you nor I wanted to give that person what he or she needed.”

Mother Teresa

Action Against Female Genital Mutilation

We have embarked on fighting Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) because there is no way women can be empowered when their rights are grossly violated.

We fight the outdated traditional practices that push the women backward, especially in the remote east of Kenya –Tharaka Nithi – where the practice is rampant and in slums where poverty and despair is the order of the day, and idleness has led to mushrooming of sects that are grossly undermining women.

Some of the members are responsible for reviving and practicing FGM and tobacco sniffing among underage girls. They lead cartels that have commercialized FGM and take an oath of secrecy, thus undermining empowerment of women.