Local non-profit helps Kenyan women break through the glass ceiling

Education is a crucial challenge for many throughout Africa – particularly for girls. And there’s a trickle-down effect: African women are severely underrepresented in decision-making positions on the continent. For instance, in sub-Saharan Africa, women hold less than 18% of parliamentary seats.

University of San Francisco political science professor Wanjiru Kamau-Rutenberg wants to change that. The Kenyan, who earned her PhD here in the U.S., wants to ensure more girls from her native country get the education they need to become leaders in their communities. So she founded Akili Dada, an organization based in both Nairobi, Kenya, and Belmont, California, that provides full scholarships to the poorest but smartest girls in the country. Akili Dada in Swahili means “sisters in intellect.”

Professor Kamau-Rutenberg joined KALW’s Hana Baba to talk about U.S. philanthropy in Africa and Akili Dada.

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WANJIRU KAMAU-RUTENBERG: There's a way in which perhaps conversation in the U.S. about philanthropy positions Africans, in particular, as passive victims. Africans can only be recipients of aid. And when it comes to who thinks about what kind of aid and what it should look like, well, you know, we come up with the ideas over here. Well, that's not really worked, so how can we move that along and get to a place where there's more of an even conversation? I'm really invested in that. I'm really passionate about that space. Because it's a space that I occupy and I want to see better. Not just as Akili Dada's founder and director, because it impacts my organization, but just as an African and as an American. Think about the United States. Women make, what, 75 cents to the dollar? It's much less across the continent, the African continent. Certainly in Kenya, women make much less compared to men for the same work. So, when you're a family and you've got limited resources and you've got to pick who to invest in. It's really an economic decision to say, "Let's send the boy to school because he's going to make more." So, yes, it's cultural, but this is real economics underlying the decisions that families make. And that's where my kind of thinking of how we do philanthropy is really about trying to get beyond the hype and really trying to look at decisions that families make.

HANA BABA: Here are some numbers from your website, as a matter of fact, that in Kenya, women constitute a mere 0.5% of top management in government ministries. They constitute 1.3% of top management in state corporations. And in Parliament, National Assemblies Parliament, right, it's 10%. Many countries have their reasons for why women aren't predominant in leadership positions. Tell me about some of the reasons in Kenya.

KAMAU-RUTENBERG: Absolutely, absolutely complicated situation. There's no one simple explanation. As I pointed out, even with the education scenario, it's not just culture, it's not just economics, the disparity in income. It's also what preparation do women have to access these positions of decision-making. And that's where my life's work has really been focused on, is in recognizing that we've got a complicated situation that's leading to all this. How can we develop an organization and program that tries to address as many of the multiple reasons for women's absence in leadership positions. And so, in addressing the economic part of it, Akili Dada offers scholarships to bright girls of poor families. Again, making sure that the economic reasons are not really viable reasons why families don't send their girls to school. The second part of it is the cultural aspects. But more often than not, the culture is also about what you've been exposed to and what you think the limits are of your horizon. So we have a mentor program that introduces these bright young women from poor families to professional women who volunteer to serve as mentors.

BABA: What are the average ages of these girls?

KAMAU-RUTENBERG: We're working with girls in their teenage years so about 13 to right now we've got women in their early 20s. So I'd say 15,16,17 – the majority of them are within that age range. And what we do is making long-term investments. So we start with a young woman when she's starting off in high school and we go with her through the four years in high school. These are one-and-a-half to two-year gap period between high school and university, so we support them through that. And then we also work with them in the university. And again these are the top students in the country, so they'll be able to access the full scholarships to the university. What we're bringing to them is a mentoring component.

And finally we have a readership training component where we say it's important to get women at that decision-making table but how we're going to be able to impact what they say and what they do with that access, right? What do they say at that table and what do they do with the access to decision-making that they have? And that's why we have a leadership training program. That's to insure that the young women who go through our Akili Dada program are confident, articulate, they've got an experience in leadership, starting from an early age, lots of experience. And that they are able to put together, think in ways that are about focused on bringing about social change and have the experience to actually implement the social change programs.

BABA: And what about the girls in Kenya – when they know this money is coming to them from America, do they have a certain idea of Americans and this possibly adjusted this idea or did they not have a pre-conceived kind of stereotype in their head of what the American was?

KAMAU-RUTENBERG: Knowing that somebody else has a vested interest in your life. Knowing that someone else is investing in your life, that's huge. That's huge for any teenager. Knowing that your life is value not to your mom or your dad but to the world, someone who you've never met thinks that you're worth enough that they're willing to put money aside to send you to school. And that is some fantastic motivation for doing well in school. We have had 11 young women finish high school; 100% of them have gotten full scholarships to university. One is on a full scholarship studying neuroscience at Vassar College and another one just got accepted into University of Pennsylvania. She's going to be our first Ivy League girl on a full scholarship. So she'll be starting this fall. And I'd like to say, it costs $4,000 to take one girl through all four years of high school, and Winnie just got herself a $57,000 a year scholarship and so you tell me where else you can make that kind of investment with $4,000 in four years will result in $57,000. It's tremendous.