SEPTEMBER 2024: UPDATE FROM THE FIELD

 Leshuta School Celebration

We first met with the community of Leshuta a year ago to discuss our shared visionfor a day secondary to serve local students. Together, we began fundraising on both sides of the Atlantic, with local community members selling goats in their "One Goat, One Classroom" fundraising effort.

At the August 5th opening celebration, Leshuta's mayor told the gathered crowd: “Last October, when we met, I did not believe it was possible to build a classroom by selling goats. But now we see how quickly it could become a reality. 2024 truly did become our “Year of Wonders.”

Participatory Video Training with Samwel Nangiria

Participatory Video (PV) is a tool that is increasingly being used by marginalized groups around the world to spark community dialogue and action on social justice and climate issues central to their lives. Access to and training in this media tool offers people the chance to control their own narratives and create stories authentic to their lived experience. Often, the process galvanizes communities to create tangible solutions to the issues they are documenting.

For five days in August, we engaged Tanzanian filmmaker and rights activist Samwel Nangiria to teach our staff and 12 of our 18 Team Angaza – our team of local female Maasai interns – the basics of Participatory Video and photography. Our Communications Director, Kate Lapides, assisted Samwel and subsequently engaged two of our team in video work. This included documenting the story of Sianoi, below, the first girl to attend our new school in Entasekera. We're excited about the possibilities that PV offers to amplify the work that our Team Angaza are currently doing to identify and address many challenges in their respective communities.

It's easy to capture the cutting of a ribbon to celebrate the successful construction of a new secondary school classroom. What's often less visible is the profound impact these classrooms can have on the arc of an individual life. Sianoi, pictured above, became the first girl to start attending the new Entasekera Day Secondary School after it opened earlier this year. Her cohort is meeting in a primary school while they await construction of their first classrooms. The fourth daughter of an older, traditional father, Sianoi is the first daughter he didn't arrange to marry at a young age, and the first to gain his blessing to continue onto secondary school – a blessing he gave only because the new school at Entasekera offers a low cost, nearby option.

Arranging marriages for daughters used to be the best way for parents to secure their futures. The idea that an education might offer a different pathway to do so is a new idea for many parents, and one that requires waiting a long time before any reward becomes tangible and real.

"Change is possible, but it needs time and understanding," our Supervisor Christine Mpoe, reminds us. Our goal with our secondary school construction program is to ensure the school infrastructure exists for parents to secure their daughters' futures in new ways by making it economically realistic for them to send them to school.

Beginning in colonial times, Kenya began a process of privatizing land. The Loita region where we work is the last communally held land to undergo this process, which is playing out now. The privatization process has proceeded rapidly without sufficient community engagement and input. Because land is not seen as something separate but as intertwined with and integral to Maasai identity, many Maasai have no concept of land as a commodity, leaving them highly vulnerable to exploitation. 
 
As part of this land demarcation process in Loita, and for the first time in Kenya's history, women were given equal land titles as local men. This shift in land ownership and assets has the potential to significantly increase women's collective voice and agency in this region, where most decision making has historically been done by men. At the same time, it is stirring the pot and creates a delicate and potentially threatening environment.
 
While our focus as an organization is on children and education, we also feel that we are in a unique space to help the people of Loita navigate this great policy shift, which will have significant impacts on every aspect of their lives and futures from their culture to their environment. With a respected Maasai land expert, we are providing the space and time for the people of Loita to come together to define their own vision for their future and create guard rails to ensure that their land isn’t sold off and the Loita Maasai live into the future. Through supporting this process we have been able to ensure that women have equal voice in the vision of Loita, a position of influence that they are fully embracing.