CoKF Scholars Attend the 2012 Kenya Gender Festival!

CoKF Scholars

Inspired and modeled on the bi-annual Tanzania Festival that has been taking place since the early 90s, the Kenya Gender festival has now taken root in Kenya. A section of the Children of Kibera Foundation scholars had the honor of attending the third edition of the Kenya Gender festival! 

CoKF believes that holistic development of the Students is imperative and therefore encourages exposure to various positive centric environments that will elevate the growth and development of the students. The gender festival is very vital as it illuminates and counters the various gender issues emergent and calls for gender parity and gender mainstreaming whereby there is provision of equal opportunities and resources for all. This was an event CoKF couldn’t afford to miss out on!
As the country heads towards the 2013 general elections, the Gender Festival 2012 looked into issues of actual implementation of Constitutional provisions for gender parity in exercising leadership.
The focus was to mobilize support and strong advocacy campaigns for enhanced women's participation in leadership spaces through electoral and other processes as provided for by the Constitution of Kenya, taking advantage of the 2013 general elections. So this year, the main objective of the Gender Festival was “to strengthen women’s movements in their pursuit of creating a conducive environment enabling them to access their rights to participation in leadership, peace building processes and access to gender justice.”
The festival had amazing plenary speakers in attendance, amongst them were Ms. Atsango Chesoni, the Executive director of Kenya  Human Rights Commission(KHRC),Wangu Kanja of Wangu Kanja Foundation, Ms. June Ashioya of FIDA Kenya and Emmah Nungari of ACORD International. Some of the topics covered included; Women representation and decision making, Peace & Reconciliation and Women’s access to and Ownership of Land and other property.
At the end of the session, the scholars got the opportunity to personally meet Ms. Atsango Chesoni who other than being the Executive director of KHCR,has extensive experience on gender issues and very passionate about gender empowerment. They got a chance to talk with her and many of the other speakers who were more than happy to share their experiences.

KHRC Executive Director,Atsango Chesoni with CoKF Team and Scholars

The festival ended with a lot of great performances, dance and a scrumptious lunch!
“My best part was learning the history of land ownership, the customary land tenure systems and the distribution of land amongst gender. I would say this event was very insightful and I am looking forward to the Kenya Gender Festival 2013.”-Linet