My Year with Stahili

Avanti Menon, Stahili’s Associate Human Rights Officer, reflects on her year with Stahili as a ChangeMaker Fellow. How did her initial assumptions about the challenges of Stahili’s work change, and what did she learn from her experience?

As a Stahili Human Rights ChangeMaker Fellow, my work involved a little bit of everything: research, drafting, social media, campaigning, fundraising, giving workshops, organising events. During the year, I learned a great deal about children’s rights and advocacy. But the most unique experience I had was learning about Stahili’s child protection and development work in Kenya.

When I joined Stahili, I knew little about the harms of orphanages and the role they play in the separation of children from their families. Based in The Hague, I liaised nearly every day with Joseph, our Field Operations Manager, and Fred, our Field Programmes Manager, in Kenya. Their everyday work in the field includes visiting the families supported by Stahili, assessing their needs, and making sure the students have all the supplies they need for school. I was also lucky enough to go to Kenya twice with Michelle, Stahili’s Executive Director, to see first-hand how Stahili’s model for the reintegration of children with their families works in detail. While in Kenya, I also led two workshops with Stahili’s students –  one on the rights of the child and the other on the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals –  and helped train staff to lead similar workshops with other students in the future.

 

Before going to Kenya, I knew that Stahili rescued children from orphanages, reunited them with their families, and supported them with their education. To me, it seemed that removing the children from orphanages was the hard part. All Stahili had left to do was raise money to pay for the children’s tuition fees, right? Wrong.

Helping children to leave orphanages is just the first step. There is a lot of work needed to ensure that reintegration is sustainable and that children stay in families. Children who grow up in poverty in Kenya are often targeted by orphanage `recruiters’ who offer to take away the children simply because their families can’t afford to care for them. The children supported by Stahili were trafficked to orphanages once before, so who’s to say it won’t happen again? This is why empowering families for the long term is essential.

In strengthening families, small things can make a big difference. For instance, when an elderly grandmother of two Stahili students lost her mobility, Stahili mobilised support to buy her a wheelchair so she could continue to care for her grandchildren. The impact of the wheelchair alone on the whole family was incredible. You can truly see the joy on her face when she was finally able to go outside again.

Another grandmother of two students was having trouble hearing, so naturally we needed to get her a hearing aid – how can she care for her grandchildren if she can’t hear them? Although this may seem like a small thing, for the family the hearing aid has made a big difference. These instances show the details we must consider in keeping families together that go far beyond reuniting children with families.

The last few months have been exceptionally difficult due to the ongoing drought in East Africa, which is expected to last until October of this year. If families are starving, their children are at an increased risk of being trafficked to orphanages, dropping out of school or being exploited in other ways. We must do all we can to ensure that families are supported holistically. Thanks to generous donors, we have been able to provide emergency food to children and families during this difficult time, although further support will be needed throughout the months ahead.

I’ll admit, keeping children in families is hard work. Some might say it’s easier to open an orphanage and keep all the children in one place. But from a human rights perspective, long term institutionalisation is one of the worst things we can do to a child, and there is no excuse for taking the ‘easy way out’. That’s why I am so proud to be part of an organisation like Stahili and to have contributed to making a real impact on the lives of children and families in Kenya. As a ChangeMaker, I can say that’s exactly what I did – make change.