Establish Girls' Empowerment Centre in Rural Kenya

During incidences of violence, local leaders and duty bearers such as chiefs, village elders, nyumba kumi heads, community health volunteers, community health practitioners and religious leaders are normally the first respondents to whom survivors seek services and advice. However most of these duty bearers lack the requisite knowledge and skills to adequately respond to survivors and offer appropriate referrals, this ultimately contributing to nature and quality of the management services offered. This may also impact whether and how the cases are litigated and justice realised.

In this quarter, we held a 3-day training to 30 such stakeholders from Homabay County, covering topics such as the first response services, the available referral pathways, roles of different duty bearers, litigation process, provisions of various anti-violence laws, organisations offering various survivor-centred and support services among others.

We believe that the training adequately equipped the stakeholders and that its benefits will transcend to survivors being served better and getting the justice they deserve.

As always, we are immensely grateful for the donations we continue to receive through the GlobalGiving platform.

• GlobalGiving_March.pdf (PDF)
  

Lack of comprehensive sexuality education is one of the key challenges adolescents face that eventually contribute to their poor health outcomes such as high rates of teen pregnancies, spontaneous abortions, early marriage, unplanned parenthood, increase in sexually transmitted infections including HIV/AIDS among others.

In continuation of the last report we did on education, this period we educated our beneficiaries, more so those who are out of school, on key aspects of their sexual reproductive health, covering topics such as sexual gender based violence, contraceptives, importance of pre-natal and post-natal care and menstrual health management. The education sessions were for both boys and girls, this based on the premise that boys too need to be helped to demystify the myths and misconceptions around girls’ sexuality to be able to understand how to support their mothers, wives, sisters and other community members. The sessions created safe and interactive areas where adolescent girls and boys talked freely on issues affecting them.

We also had one-on-one sessions where the adolescents asked the program officer their personal questions, issues for advice and counselling.

We continue to be grateful for the GlobalGiving donations – the girls are happy and by extension, NIGEE is happy.

• GlobalGiving_November.pdf (PDF)