Help us launch our Hope for Widow's pilot program this year!
Your support will help change the lives of women and girls into the future
Your support will help change the lives of women and girls into the future
"Hope for Widows" Program
Background
There
has been a major change in the land use law in Kenya. The historic communal
land ranches for the Maasai tribe (similar to Indian Reservations in
the US), called Group Ranches, no longer have legal status. Many of
Water is Life Kenya’s projects are located in Group Ranches.
The change
in the law has forced each Group Ranch to subdivide its land among
registered members. Under the new land subdivision plans, and in order
to be able to claim their allocated land parcels, members are required
to pay a fee for land surveying costs and paperwork. This fee has proved
too much for poor Group Ranch members, especially widows.
This buried inequity
became evident to Water is Life Kenya because of our many projects in
Olgulului / Ololarashi Group Ranch and our close relationship with
community members. WILK promotes gender equity and women’s empowerment
through our clean water / WASH, Livestock as a Business and Beaded
Handicraft Programs. We learned that these widows stood to be completely
disenfranchised due to their inability to pay the fees. We saw the
imminent danger of their chasm of poverty being dug deeper, since they
would miss out on obtaining this valuable asset.
In fact, we had
been observing that the applicant groups to our LAB program don’t
include many widows or other extremely poor women. We realized that they
have a hard time joining groups because of their inability to pay the
membership fees (set by the groups themselves and not particularly high,
but unattainable for most of these widows).
Through a generous
and caring donor, we were able to pay the fees for 40 widows and their
families to secure their rightful land asset. As we collected basic
information from these women, the reality began to emerge of the huge
burdens these women carry due to lack of resources.
Securing
their land was a huge boost to them, but, in fact, they have many needs -
reliable income for food, clothing, and school fees. They are under
immediate pressure to sell the land for cash to the land brokers
circling like starving hyenas.
Hope for Widows Program
To address this vital need we are piloting the “Hope for Widows” program under our Livestock as a Business (LAB) Program. In addition to the adapting the LAB curriculum to address the specific needs of the widows, WILK will provide them seed capital to get a jump start on economic empowerment through a livestock business, so they can propel themselves from survival into meeting their families’ basic needs and build a new level of financial freedom.
This new program is a perfect example of how our Livestock as a Business program is able to expand and replicate not only within our current project area in the Maasai heartland, but also elsewhere.
The program format of working with
- groups of 15-20 individuals who know each other,
- learn together and
- share the responsibility of cow care and loan repayment from purchase to sale has proven successful.
This full cycle of the LAB program takes 13 months and can easily be adapted for other indigenous populations, according to their values and economic resources.
Groups can continue in the LAB program for up to 4 years, with years 2-4 including
- supplemental training,
- field trips,
- the livestock loan and
- the provision of incentives for implementing drought control strategies like grass management and forage conservation.
Needs Assessment
Water is Life Kenya conducted a needs assessment survey and interviewed 18 widows from the Kajiado County, southern Kenya. They live in our project area, specifically in Olgulului Group Ranch. Below is a summary of those questionnaires.
Click here to see the Summary Report of Widows Questionnaires