Women’s Empowerment
Mirror of Hope (MOH) runs a women’s empowerment program which is designed to:
- support women by offering them; health education, practical skills training, financial literacy, life-skills training and entrepreneurship.
- provide training in sustainable urban agriculture methods focusing on the Home Harvest Model where the women are trained on how to construct vertical soil pods (sack gardens) that contain up to 70 individual plants of various varieties and can be easily placed by their door side.
More about Mirror of Hope
Mirror of Hope (MOH) is a community-based organization (CBO), founded in 2010, that is dedicated to enhancing access to education and socio-economic empowerment opportunities for children, youth and women living in Kibera slums, Nairobi, Kenya. For close to a decade the organization has worked with close to 270 women from Kibera, most of who are HIV positive, to get 65 business start-ups, up and running. The organization that is founded on hope and rooted in love, works towards social transformation for communities around Kibera.
MOH is strongly rooted in its philosophy of giving communities a hand up as opposed to a hand out in a bid to teach them sustainable ways of empowering themselves. Programs are structured in a way to empower vulnerable women and children to determine their own futures by learning sustainable ways of going about making their lives better.
The context within which MOH works in Kibera is defined by a densely populated slum environment, with poor infrastructure, inadequate social amenities, high level of crime and high rates of unemployment among the youth. Kibera is a popular informal settlement in Nairobi, Kenya with an estimated population of between 500,000 to 700,000 inhabitants (UNHABITAT, 2016). The majority of the inhabitants here are low-income earners and live below 1$ per day and at the same time live in poor living conditions characterized by small shacks normally 12ft x 12ft built with mud walls, screened with concrete, a corrugated tin roof, dirt or concrete floor.
Kibera is continually affected with circles of post-election violence from time to time and remains the epicentre of post-election violence in the country. Kibera is one of the landing areas for those migrating from rural areas to Nairobi city seeking for greener pastures. This continually creates a need that government and other non-profits continually seek to address. The rate of HIV/AIDS prevalence within the slum is also high, compounding problems related to poverty and Government neglect.
MOH has 8 staff members and 2 volunteers who deliver the two main projects under education and women empowerment. In addition to this MOH boasts of a pool of volunteers from the partnering organizations such as Nairobits, the local parish, young debater’s society and well-wishers. In addition, MOH relies on the support of various organizations in order to run its program. These include Edmund Rice Foundation Australia, Foundation Le Pont in Canada, Arcaid in Ireland, N’give in Denmark, 99 Bikes in Australia, Adventure Out Loud in Australia, Youth Out loud in Australia, Project Harambee in the USA, Rutgers University in the USA and individual supporters across the globe.
In future, MOH would like to provide training in other important vocational skills such as peanut processing, cake baking, yoghurt making, tailoring, embroidery and hairdressing as well as expanding and bettering the already existing programs to reach even more clients.