Building Resilient Communities for Adolescent Girls and Young Women
The story of a young African leader providing holistic support for Kenyan girls to lead healthy lives
Supporting Girls and Young Women in Kamukunji Slum in Kenya
Imagine feeling like your heart is beating so quickly that it might break through your chest. You are sweating, and struggling to breathe, and feel confused, and exhausted. A deep sense of dread and the burning desire to get out of your situation overcomes you. This is what anxiety can feel like. It robs you of your ability to feel like yourself.
Now, imagine a combination of anxiety and socioeconomic stress, plus the knowledge that you are an adolescent girl or a young woman living in a place where permission from men is required for you to be your true self.
This is a reality for many women and girls living in Kamukunji slum in Eldoret town in Kenya. But Work Her Dream, an organization created by Kenyan Young African Leaders Initiative (YALI) Regional Leadership Center (RLC) East Africa alumna Lily Okeyo, provides safe spaces and psychological support to adolescent girls and young women.
No Education. No Voice. No Permission to Exist.
Young girls in the slums are at consistently increasing risk of socioeconomic and physical exploitation. COVID-19 related lockdowns and socioeconomic downturns in Kenya have added an extra burden.
Lily founded Work Her Dream in 2016, together with a group of friends from Moi University in Eldoret in Kenya. The local organization provides holistic support, including: education mentorship and sponsorship, mental health services, economic empowerment, and more importantly, a community of sisterhood.
Lily shared: “There was a girl in the community whose family would sell her for sex at KSH 20 ($0.17) per caller. She was rescued and taken to a shelter. But soon after went back home because her siblings still lived at home and were likely to face the same thing she did. She actually went back to rescue her siblings. However, they all went back home again after some convincing from their family.”
“A lot of our girls have stories of things they go through both for survival and to just exist,” she added.
Working for Her Dream
At age 21, Lily found herself living in a slum. “This was just how hard life had beaten me down,” she explained. “It was around this time that I gave birth to my first born. I am fully aware and connected to what our girls go through.”
While in the slum, Lily lived with an abusive partner, suffered from depression and attempted suicide. Friends and health care workers provided her with psychosocial support and she moved back to live with her mother. While receiving care and treatment at the Moi Teaching and Referral Hospital, Lily became passionate about mental health and decided to pursue it as a career. In 2011, she joined Moi University’s West Campus, which is located in the middle of several slums, including Kamkunji. She graduated in 2015 with an undergraduate degree in counseling psychology.
With an undergraduate degree, Lily’s passion, education, and work became in sync. She remembers telling her classmates that her dream was to set up an organization that supports young women in slums with support from mental health professionals. But how to pay these professionals was a pipe dream at that moment.
Enter YALI RLC East Africa in 2019, a USAID program providing high quality training, mentoring, and networking support to young leaders in 14 East and Central African countries.
Lily had already built the design for Work Her Dream Organization but needed advice to take it to the next level. In fact, the organization was part of a design challenge for YALI leadership training. Design challenges are competitions during the YALI training that help participants create better solutions to society’s most complicated problems. The insights from this challenge were implemented to take the organization even further.
“We began with six girls in 2016. Today, we have more than 300 girls who we support in education, menstrual health, counselling and socioeconomic empowerment,” 35-year-old Lily said.
“I used to consider and calculate every risk very carefully, but through YALI, I learned to trust people and open myself more to connecting and networking. YALI taught me to be more open and vulnerable. This allows me to build networks to support these communities of young women.”
Mama Violet, the Chief, and the Team
Lily’s team does not function in a silo. Assistance comes from people like Isevwa Davis, a village elder. Everyone calls her Mama Violet. She provides support to the local government-appointed Administration Chief.
“The chief can never be found in his office, he is always involved in many engagements in the community: rescuing children from abusive homes, resolving conflict, and raiding illicit alcohol dens,” Lily said.
The chief and Mama Violet are invaluable, helping Lily’s team identify young women in desperate need of counseling. They are taught how to be self-sufficient and lean on each other for support. During their weekly check-ins, they open up to each other, sharing their struggles and triumphs. Work Her Dream has an operational team of six: two counselors, two community mobilizers, and an assistant who provides much needed counseling and socio-economic support for the girls.
Cynthia is one of 300 girls supported by Lily’s organization. A partial orphan, Cynthia stayed out of school for long periods due to lack of school fees before Work Her Dreams stepped in to help.
“I faced many challenges, got pregnant, and struggled to afford basic needs. After I heard about what Work Her Dream does to support girls like me, I was eager to receive dignity kits, mentorship, sisterhood, education support, and life skills training. I am a high school graduate and I am very proud of this achievement!” Cynthia said.
Cynthia is pursuing a course in beauty at a local college on partial scholarship. She uses the income she receives from selling woven mats to help her pay for learning materials and other daily expenses.
“What I am most proud of are the girls I mentor. I see so much of myself in them. It is my pay-it-forward commitment that gives me much more than I could ask for,” Cynthia concluded.
About the Authors
Irene Angwenyi is a Development Outreach and Communications Specialist at USAID Kenya and East Africa. Andrew Onyango is a Communications Specialist for Management Systems International.
About Young African Leadership Initiative (YALI)
USAID is committed to working with YALI Regional Leadership Centers (RLCs) to support and partner with young people to drive growth and prosperity, strengthen democratic governance, and enhance peace and security across Africa.
