Solar MP3 Education for Pastoral Women in Kenya

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.