How Pitt alumna Kakenya Ntaiya fights for the rights of women and girls in rural Kenya

Kakenya Ntaiya made it her mission to prevent others from experiencing female genital mutilation (FGM) and child marriage.

A global educator and activist, Ntaiya (EDUC ’11G) supports the health of women and girls through Kakenya’s Dream, a nonprofit she founded in 2009 while pursuing her doctorate at the University of Pittsburgh.

The organization invests in girls from rural Kenya through education, health, leadership and self-defense initiatives, including two boarding schools for those most at risk. The schools and a support program for their alumni have provided nearly 1,000 girls with educational, financial, academic and social support in their transitions to high school and university in communities where only 17% of women completed elementary school and 10% finished high school.

“Think about the young people who’ve gone through our programs. What they’ll be able to do is beyond what we can imagine. If we don’t [continue to] break the silence, it will continue for generations to come,” Ntaiya told Pittwire in an April interview.

Kakenya’s story

When she was 5, Ntaiya, an Enoosaen village native, was engaged to be married. Desiring a different trajectory for her life, she approached her father with a proposal.

“I did go through FGM — to escape child marriage and continue with schooling, eventually getting a scholarship to go to school in the U.S.,” she said, recalling threatening to run away if she couldn’t continue learning. “If I didn’t [undergo FGM], he would have faced public shame, stigma and ridicule in the community.”  

Though illegal in Kenya, the nation remains one of 30 countries in Africa, Asia and the Middle East, where FGM, also known as cutting, is concentrated and practiced on girls from infancy to age 15, according to the World Health Organization. The organization defines FGM as all procedures involving partial or total removal of the external female genitalia or other injuries to the female genital organs for nonmedical reasons that yield no health benefits. While girls are one-third less likely to undergo FGM today than 30 years ago, the 2021 United Nations Population Fund’s Annual Report warns that 475,022 Kenyan girls remain at risk through 2030.

Outcomes can be dire: death from excessive bleeding or infection, childbirth complications, lifelong physical pain, and mental and emotional trauma, according to anti-female genital cutting group Orchid Project.

But FGM continues in Kenya and beyond, Ntaiya said, because of a disconnect between policymakers and practicing communities.  

“The Maasai people, we’re very, very traditional and that sets expectations for women and men that drives certain expectations for girls and boys,” Ntaiya said. “It’s a form of control for women. [But at Kakenya’s Dream], we want to ensure women don’t have to experience physical pain for years [or] the internal pain that you’re not complete.”

Ntaiya said her mother is her hero, having jeopardized her safety to provide Ntaiya, the oldest of eight children, as well as her five sisters, with a nurse following FGM to ensure they properly healed.

A major challenge currently facing Kakenya’s Dream is an uptick in the medicalization of FGM, where a community nurse does the procedure, though it is still “underground.”

“[They] can eliminate the transmission of diseases and infections using a clean knife, eliminate bleeding too much because it’s done in a medical facility, but the long-term harm is not eliminated,” Ntaiya said.

She wants to be sure young people have the services they need and hopes to expand with a youth health care facility before the end of the year.  

 “There's a lot of stigma, when they go to the government health center, that the government has, so we want to have them in a stigma-free [environment] with access to whatever information young people need — counseling, medical doctors, their resources, books, gynecologists, whatever they want and should be able to have.”