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WE BELIEVE THAT...
Until we restore the health of our women, we will
never restore the health of our communities.
Until we stop the maiming of women, we cannot turn
back the historic maiming of our culture or the
modern maiming of our
countryside.
Until we empower women, we will never activate the
paradigms needed to heal our environment.
Until we educate women, we will never end cycles
of famine and disease and build a sustainable economy.
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KMG’s programs
are designed to merge the best of Kembatta’s traditional
wisdom and expertise with the best of modern science and
technology.
We identify three different programmatic threads: women’s
health, livelihood,
and environment. These programs
are inextricably linked so we can address women as whole
human beings facing a variety of challenges and decisions
each day. While we focus on women, our goal is positive
change for all our community members. In a society where
women have traditionally been considered little better
than the cows they milk, one of the most memorable comments
we’ve heard came from a village elder who finally
realized that his wife was,quite literally, a human being
like him. “Now I understand what it means to love
my wife,” he said.
While KMG desperately needs and depends upon international
donations, we believe the only way to end cycles of famine
and disease is to enable our women and their families
to strengthen their own communities. Often, at the end
of our training or organizing sessions, we ask participants
to design programs themselves. Different communities,
we find, often come up with different approaches to common
problems.
We try to be resourceful in our methods and efficient
in our expenditure of funds, as our audits show. When
we started our work in Durame in 1997, we began with scientific
baseline household surveys by which we can measure our
subsequent progress. We build strategic partnerships to
take advantage of existing infrastructure and respected
local leadership, as well as to reduce our expenses and
the distances we travel. Despite our small staff, we have
introduced ongoing reproductive health and other programs
into more than 50 schools, many churches and, increasingly,
mosques as well. We have made advocates of police and
prosecutors who never knew until our training programs
that there are laws protecting women against abuse, abduction,
and rape.
We use many methods, not all of them traditional. We hook
a video recorder up to a generator on our four-wheel drive
and show a tape of an actual female genital excision to
men who have never before seen moving pictures and had
never understood the brutality of this “surgery”
carried out in secrecy with young girls gagged to muffle
their screams. We helped introduce theater and performance
art to Kembatta. Sometimes we sing, and children carry
rhymes about HIV/AIDS home to illiterate parents. Always,
we engage in dialogue and converse with our communities
as equals, allowing them to make their own informed decisions.
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