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Date published: 3/9/2003
WHEN MOURINE AKINYI joined a youth-league soccer team, she was just looking for some fun. But when two American women showed up last May at the soccer field in Kibera--a sprawling shantytown whose tin and mud shacks blanket the hills southwest of Kenya's capital Nairobi--it marked a turning point in the 18-year-old's life. Akinyi was selected to be one of 12 young women from the slum who would launch a reproductive-health and women's-rights project that aimed to explore difficult issues through group discussions, role-playing and photography. Akinyi credits the program, which group members named Binti Pamoja ("Daughters United" in Kiswahili), with bolstering her confidence and steering her away from trouble. "When I was not in the group, my life was not the way it is now. I was in bad company," she said recently in an interview in Kibera. Karen Austrian and Emily Verellen had hoped for such success stories when they conceived the project, whose first phase was a two-month session last summer. The Americans met in Kenya during their junior year of college. Austrian, then studying at Columbia University, was researching the women's-rights movement and reproductive-health issues in Kenya. Verellen, a student at American University, was doing work with Nairobi street children. They discovered there were numerous youth programs for boys, but not many for girls. They also observed a shortage of reproductive-health outreach programs geared primarily for young, unmarried women. "There was definitely a need" for a reproductive-health education program targeting teenage girls, Austrian said in a phone interview from New York. In Kenya, as in many other parts of the world, sexuality represents that aspect of life where gender inequality and public-health crises converge. A nationwide survey of Kenyan women 12 to 24 years old found that 25 percent lost their virginity in forced sexual encounters. And Kenyan women of all ages, married and unmarried, generally lack the autonomy to refuse sex or demand that their partners use condoms.
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