The Hiari Project is a project dedicated to fight against female genital mutilation, forced early marriage and lack of equal opportunity to education for women and girls. Currently based in Kenya with hopes to expand to neighboring countries facing similar issues.

Mission

Our mission 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:

Step one:

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.

Step two:

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.

Step three:

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.

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.