Empower marginalized women and men in rural Kenya

Background

Since 2011, Action10, with the help of Human Rights & Science (HR&S), has been engaging and empowering marginalized people in Kenya's remote villages through the table banking model, which improves access to investment capital. This ensures that people, especially the poor, participate in economic activities that benefit both the person and society. As a result, these individuals are better equipped to combat poverty, maintain financial stability, and run profitable businesses.

Action10 visted Kenya

Recently, Freja and Felicia from Action10 visited Kenya and the entrepreneurs living there, together with Kevin from HR&S Kenya. This was a great opportunity to learn more about the projects we support together with our donors, and to better understand the challenges in the rural areas in Kenya.

We reflect together over the challenges raised durin the meeting and agree on how we shall address those.

• Climate change leading to poor harvest. Farming is not promising, because of unpredictable weather patterns due to climate change, pests and diseases. We incur huge losses sometimes, yet we use a lot of money to rent land, buy fertilizer, seeds only to harvest nothing.
• We have had cases of some members delaying to pay back their loans. Though this is rare.
• People not sure of the benefits of the group due to lack of proper education. “People don’t understand why they should save, they just want quick money. They are not ready to wait for long”, one member said.
• External conflicts like land issues. We have had some land issues, because ‘they’ wanted to take away our land. We have been solving that as a village.

These insights are critical to understanding the challenges that the people in Kenya are facing, and helps Action10 together with its partners to better allocate the resources available in an efficient way.

Links:

• Human Rights & Science - Project Link
• Action10 - Project Link