Three interconnected programs defending economic, social, and cultural rights
Our work is organized around three core pillars that address the most pressing human rights violations experienced by women in urban slums and Indigenous communities. Climate justice and gender are crosscutting issues mainstreamed across all our programs, with attention to intersecting factors that create layered experiences of discrimination and marginalization.
Over 60% of urban residents live in slums and informal settlements in Kenya. Most of these neighbourhoods lack security of tenure and are characterized by lack of essential services, overcrowding and forced evictions. While the Constitution of Kenya 2010 guarantees the right to adequate housing, it remains a right on paper.
Mass forced evictions remain a common reality for people living in slums and informal settlements. Climate Change is being used to dispossess and displace Indigenous Communities of their ancestral lands. Women bear the brunt of adequate housing rights violations through forced evictions, lack of access to essential services, and affordability challenges. Gender inequality, cultural and social norms exacerbate their housing human rights experiences.
The highest attainable standards of health, though a provision anchored in our Constitution of Kenya 2010, remains a big luxury for the majority of people in Kenya. The cost of accessing health care services remains a nightmare especially to people living in slums and informal communities. Many poor people end up using unsafe health methods.
Women continue to grapple with the in-dignifying health reality both as right holders and caregivers. The state has the obligation to respect, protect and fulfil health rights for all regardless of their status in life. Situating access to health as a human right is important, hence the need to enable women undertake advocacy on the right to highest attainable standards of health.
The right to education encompasses access, quality, affordability and availability. Right holders in poor neighborhoods and Indigenous communities experience discrimination and marginalization with regards to provision of the right to education. Inequality in resource distribution, infrastructure and cultural norms make it very difficult for women and girls from poor and marginalized communities to thrive in education.
National and county policies are not enabling and have remained contentious in many aspects affecting girls and women. Representation in organs and structures involved in decision making is skewed against poor and illiteracy challenged women from the poor and marginalized communities in the urban slums and Indigenous community. All these result to further marginalization of the very communities that are more deserving.
We employ a range of strategies to advance rights across all three pillars
Informal participatory community forums where the community convenes to share issues affecting them, dissect the problems, propose solutions and determine what needs to be done to make duty bearers act. Women take the lead in planning, convening and facilitating these forums.
Training on strategic campaigning, lobbying and advocacy, human rights awareness, monitoring documentation and reporting, media engagement, public speaking, negotiation, leadership, conflict management, and community organizing.
Community support in investigations and building evidence on human rights violations through monitoring, documentation and reporting (MDR) and participatory action research (PAR). This enables targeted and strategic advocacy for accountability and change.
Enhancing the campaigning capacity of affected community women to effectively direct their energies and resources to the actual problem and appropriate duty bearers. Communities learn to synergize for power and spread risk.
Community-driven PIL where affected communities co-create initiatives using indigenous knowledge and collective histories to influence court decisions. Communities have a big role in shaping PIL processes, not just waiting on lawyers.
Mainstreaming qualitative and quantitative reporting of economic, social and cultural rights. Building strong feminist narratives and centering community women HRDs roles. Using traditional knowledge of oral and artistic approaches.
A radical neighbourhood approach bringing people together to identify violations and people's inherent strengths and locally available resources to take action around common violations and overcome social injustices.
Public mobilization and soft persuasion as a power tool for accountability where people's rights are at imminent risk. Right holders evoke their constitutional rights in demanding state compliance.