Empowering HER.

Mission

Our goal is to protect the basic human rights of women and children and provide them opportunity to thrive with the gift of education and other programs.

Goals

At the Hiari Project, our goal is to prepare the girls for school, to provide learning a creative craft for expression of their stories , and to give them agency to advocate for their health, success, and independence. Here’s how we do that:

one:
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Meet with the families of each girl that has come to us for help and to offer the option of allowing her to attend school as an alternative to forced early marriage and FGM.

two:
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Launch fundraising programs to provide for school fees, boarding costs, and basic human necessities. Once enrolled, the process is overseen by volunteer staff of The Hiari Project. We oversee the entire process, ensuring the environment is safe and productive. The objective is to guide them through their senior year of high-school and beyond, when they display interest.

three:
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Provide the first opportunity for the freedom to decide, given newly learned tools, experiences, and hopeful insight as to how they wish to build their futures. We are lucky to witness the butterfly effect take place until the day that education is consistently accessible, and a favored option for women and girls in these rural Kenyan communities.

four:
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Studies show that educating women in a small community has the ripple effect of educating families, communities, and building on learnings. The goal of The Hiari Project is to ultimately put the agency of change into the hands of these young women. Providing an opportunity to build on their experience and to allow them to give back to their communities. For the girls who express leadership goals, to advocate for girls and women in their communities of origin. The vision is to build a secondary educational program to teach interested candidates about how to build on The Hiari Project model of empowering girls and young women. These girls have expressed great interest in being strong figures in their community that advocate for female equality and anti FGM and forced early marriage practices. We plan on making a model, for each region, where the girls run this project. We want to empower these women by giving them the tools they need to help each other and help themselves.

Meet the new girls

Meet the original girls

HIARI means OPTION.

We invite you to help bring choices back to the lives of girls and women without.

About

A note from the founder:

About two years ago I was headed back to Kenya for another project I had been working on. While preparing for that project, I received a phone call from a friend in the very village I was headed to. This friend needed my help with a problem having to do with 10 girls from the village who were all up for their “ceremony”. I had heard of FGM but the details were beyond my imagination. FGM stands for female genital mutilation. To learn more about FGM click here. Beyond the brutality and emotional trauma of the way they force this cutting on the girls, it can also lead to infectious diseases, problems urinating and menstruating, birthing complications and fatalities,

I was asked to help find a solution to save these 10 girls from the FGM process or they were planning to run away. In the environment they currently live, this plan could potentially have severe consequences, equally or more dangerous to them. I knew neither of these options were in the best interest of the girls, so I decided to look for a safer option that would equally benefit the girls and their community.

The work I had been doing leading up to this dilemma was teaching photography to local people in different communities struggling with different issues. Past projects had been focused on issues such as the water crisis, orphaned children looking for a stable home and education, and livestock diseases leaving villages with nothing. Each project had enabled the locals to be the story teller of their own story and in the end feel the effects of their own work. They were able to raise awareness and in turn raise money for wells, livestock, a new orphanage etc… So I decided to do the same thing with these girls. I wanted them to capture their stories and share them to raise awareness and find a solution. So I stayed with them in their village for a few months teaching them photography.

While getting to know these girls and their families, I learned a lot about their cultural beliefs; particularly about the level of importance to the families for the girls to undergo “the cut”. This process was meant to insure virginity and make the girl ready for marriage. In their culture “a cut girl” is worth about 10 more cows to the family than an un-cut girl. But we figured out that an educated girl is also worth about 10 more cows. Not to mention the potential to be employed which can someday really help out the family. I started asking the families if they’d be willing to forgo the cut if I paid for the girls school fees. It was almost a unanimous yes. The families were able to see the greater good. They just can’t afford school. So we found the solution! Sending the girls to school made the family happy and the girl stoked. Not to mention, when she graduates as an educated adult, she can choose to marry whoever she pleases. Rather than being forced to marry some guy with 7 wives at the age of 13.

This leads me to today. I’m starting the Hiari project to help more girls like the ones in my story. In Kiswahili “Hiari” translates to “option”. We want to help girls to have an option to make the choice for their bodies and their future. I’ve had 12 girls in school for going on 3 years now, but there are so many more girls asking to be a part of the project. I have the support of the chief from the village who hopes to end FGM in his community. Our short term goal is open a girls home in Kenya, close to the school where the girls can live safely while perusing their education as well as build an adult education center for the women who have already been victimized. Our long term goal is to end FGM for good by educating the men and families who continue to demand this practice. We want to show how much a woman can flourish and benefit her community if given the chance to grow rather than be suppressed.

So many of us take for granted the incredible gift of choice. We invite you to help bring choices back to the lives of women without.