Solar MP3 Education for Pastoral Women in Kenya

Our CEO, Kristine Pearson, spent most of June in Kenya progressing this and other initiatives in Kenya with our local partners. We noted in our previous report that the project’s implementation had been delayed. And now it’s further delayed.

When you’re close to an election, as Kenya has been, you need government cooperation and support, yet everyone seems distracted. That’s because they are. People were hesitant to make decisions in the case there would be a new party in charge come August. We need the government’s support for both content (the Ministry of Education) and other ministries involved in the duty-exempt clearance of the Lifeplayer units. When we have that, we’ll be able to send them to Kenya. It’s both the national government and the government in Marsabit County that we need to have on-board and fully supportive. Luckily, so far so good, but our timing is poor.

It was determined in June that we would have to wait until after the elections to proceed with this project. Our key partner in the north, Horn of Africa Development Initiative and its staff, were involved in the elections in some way – by holding inter-faith meetings on the democratic process, encouraging women to vote, and by monitoring the polling stations to ensure they were peaceful. By all accounts, in Marsabit County, the elections were free, fair and peaceful.

We’ve also made the point before that new projects often have unforeseen challenges or we underestimate how long something can take to get off the ground.  Perserverance is one of our specialiites! 

Now that the elections are over, Kristine will be returning in September to tie up loose ends, finalise the content partners, and meet with on-the-ground collaborators to kickstart the implementation of this much needed project. The women are keen listening group participants and are anxious to get begin learning.

As always, we’ll keep you posted.

Creating a project to ensure maximum impact and reach takes careful planning and coordination.  Operating in rural areas is Africa is often challenging and working with pastoral populations even more so given how spread out and far flung they are with their livestock.  

Lifeline had hoped to formally launch Solar MP3 Education for Pastoral Women, or Her Voice as we call it, during June.  However, the process is taking a little longer than we anticipated.  We are continuing to gather content that the women want and are pleased that the BBC have been extremely helpful.  They're donating many hours of practical health, hygiene and nutrition content which we will load onto our Lifeplayer units.  Our local partner, Horn of Africa Development Initiative, will also need to translate some of that content into local languages as many of the pastoral women do not speak Swahili, which is the language of most of the BBC content.  This process takes time to get right. 

Another benefit of a delayed launch is that it gives us more time to raise additional funds to bring in more Lifeplayer units to help even more women's groups. Our aim it to reach not only women who travel with the livestock, but also women who have moved to towns.  They're called "drop-out" pastoralists, which simply means that their livestock have died.  Given the catastrophic drought in the Horn of Africa, more families are becoming drop-out pastoralists and they'll need new skills to survive in towns. Our Lifeplayers can help as well with literacy, numeracy and basic business skills. 

Lifeline Energy is visiting the project in June to move it forward and we will have more to report in our next update. We hope you understand and we sincerely appreciate your continued support.