GROOTS Kenya

Published as part of the Association for Women's Rights in Development (AWID)'s Building Feminist Movements and Organisations (BFEMO) initiative, this 13-page paper describes Grassroots Organizations Operating Together in Sisterhood (GROOTS) Kenya, which is a member network of GROOTS International. This network of self-help groups works to strengthen the role of grassroots women in community development by serving as a platform for grassroots women's groups and individuals to: come together, to share their ideas/experiences, to network, and to find avenues to directly participate in decision making, planning, and implementation of issues that affect them. This case study provides a description of GROOTS Kenya, followed by an analysis of GROOTS Kenya based on ongoing theoretical and activist debates around feminist organisations and movements, and their functions.

Following a discussion of social movements and women's movements in Kenya, author Awino Okech begins tracing the history of GROOTS Kenya, which emerged from the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, China, in 1995. As she explains, the various groups within the regions in which GROOTS Kenya works link at different times through programmes or specific advocacy messages. There is a constant process of capacity building, with groups exiting and entering. GROOTS Kenya also conducts peer-learning exchanges amongst the regional groups. These exchanges are aimed at opening up spaces for them to speak on their own behalf. This in turn facilitates their involvement in decision-making processes at the local and international level.

To illustrate how this process works, Okech shares details of her interview with Anne Muthia, a member of GROOTS Kenya through one of its regional groups, GROOTS Mathare Mothers Development Centre (GMMDC). The idea of a mothers' development centre was borrowed from Germany as a result of a peer learning exchange in 1997 facilitated by GROOTS Kenya. Through the support of GROOTS Kenya, upon their return from Germany, the women found a space for regular meetings and then developed a day care centre for children to address the childcare needs of their members as well as other women in the community who are unable to afford child care support. In addition, upon realising that some of their members were unable to attend meetings regularly due to the responsibility of providing home-based care to family members who were ailing largely due to HIV/AIDS opportunistic infections, the group, through GROOTS Kenya, received training on home-based care. As a result of the work around home-based care, there was a natural transition to working with orphans and vulnerable children (OVC).

As Okech explains, GROOTS Kenya works within 4 thematic areas to carry out peer learning exchanges, to amplify the voices of grassroots communities, to provide capacity-building, to undertake advocacy, and to conduct outreach and networking. These thematic areas are:

1. Community Responses to HIV/AIDS - advocacy and programmatic activities involve supporting communities through training and capacity building of women.
2. Community Resources and Livelihood - communities are led through processes of analysing and mobilising local resources.
3. Women and Property Programme - safeguarding property rights of women and orphans.
4. Women Leadership and Governance - building women's capacity to negotiate and navigate community and national decision-making processes.

Focusing in particular on the fourth component, above, Okech observes that the "The capacity building process...seems to have yielded fruit. Muthia of the GMMDC asserts that their connection with GROOTS Kenya has developed the ability of their members to play critical roles within local leadership structures." Okech goes on to explain that the grassroots work of GROOTS Kenya and its affiliated organisations has not adopted protest-oriented action as a key mechanism to achieving their goals; instead, emphasis has been laid on lobbying and advocacy. Several examples of this participation - at not only the local, but the international level as well - from Muthia's perspective (and in her words) follow within the text. Summing up the key achievement, she says, "[t]he fact that we have been able to send grassroots women to international conferences – UN meetings in New York and Geneva to speak has changed the perceptions around grassroots women and their capacities to contribute to local, national and global debates."

Okech then asks a series of conceptual questions, such as: whether GROOTS Kenya can be considered "feminist" in its approach to grassroots solidarity building, whether GROOTS Kenya has contributed to achieving a new cultural identity for "grassroots" women, and the extent to which GROOTS Kenya emphasise women's strategic (vs. practical) needs. Amongst her conclusions is the assertion that it is unfortunate that there is an apparent lack of strategic connections with gender or feminist organisations in Kenya. In short, "there are many ways in which the work that GROOTS Kenya is doing is laudable, in terms of its efforts at building a grassroots based movement that spans the geographical hence ethnic divide that is Kenya. However, with the seeming disengagement from mainstream women's rights organizations (whether at a regional or national level), the result is parallel work that could easily benefit from ideological as well as strategic input from other organizations."