From personal to political
Purity Kagwiria, Executive Director of Akili Dada and founding advisor for FRIDA, is a living example of the magic that happens when you use your life story to shape the impact you have on the world. Based in Nairobi, Purity applies her personal experiences to the decisions she makes in her work for gender justice to this day.
Thinking back to the experiences that led her to a life of women’s rights activism, Purity describes a vivid memory from a time when she was thirteen years of age. “My grandmother was sick. She had a flu and she had lost her voice. My grandfather is a polygamist. One of his sons was keeping goats, and these goats had eaten my grandmother’s kale that she had planted. In the evening, she says to [my grandfather], ‘Your son’s goats ate my kale and spinach,’ and my grandfather said, ‘How do you know it was the goats? Why would you say that?’ He kept asking, ‘Who was there to witness this?’
I said to him, ‘Why would you demand from a grown woman to have evidence when she tells you something happened? Why would you demand that she has someone else that was there so that her voice can count?’ And of course later on, I learnt that this is the discourse. This is how women are treated in many spaces. My grandmother was voiceless – literally – she was sick, she couldn’t speak. When I started working on women’s rights issues, I really connected my activism to that moment when I knew I had to be a person who speaks up.”
“My mom was very absent in my life when I was growing up, so my grandparents ended up taking debts so they could pay for my school fees. In as much as we didn’t lack housing, or food, they didn’t have the cash that was needed to pay for my schooling, so I was constantly sent in and out of school. I finished high school by the mercies of God, because my classmates went and spoke to the school administration this one time when I had been sent home. They said, ‘if you don’t let this girl come back to school, she’s going to drop out.’ So the administration agreed to admit me back.”
Wanting to study after school, a friend’s parents paid for Purity to do a computer course, and shortly thereafter, the people in her church also got together to pay for her university fees to study journalism. “That’s how I have an education, just based on people’s good will. And that’s the basis of my activism today. The work I do now is centred around girls’ education, ensuring that people don’t have to always struggle. I want to ensure that more girls and young women are walking in the path that we’ve already walked in, but with ease.”
For Purity, it was attending the African Women Leadership Institute at Akina Mama wa Afrika in Uganda that sparked a fire in her for women’s rights activism and helped her understand feminism. Around that same time, she applied for the AWID Young Leadership programme, which was to be held in Coyoacán. “When I went to Mexico, we were all young women from all parts of the world. That’s where I met Amina Doherty who ended up being the first official coordinator for FRIDA Fund. At that time, Shamillah Wilson used to work at AWID and was the one organising this young women institute. She taught us about the tensions in the movement, and things around age and class.”
“The way AWID structured the meeting was for the young women to come first. We spent a week together before other women – I think it was women funders, actually – arrived. As soon as they checked in, you could see the dynamics had changed. Being in that space made me realise that when young women come into a particular space, you can’t just let them be. For some of them, it is their first international trip, it is the first time they are seeing so many charged, powerful women in the same space, and I think that’s one of the reasons young women take quite long to actually speak up in processes. By the time they are speaking up, they are already exiting their youth bracket. They are no longer being seen as young.”
“The idea of starting a young feminist fund started off in a meeting that AWID held in Marrakech in Morocco. I wasn’t part of that meeting, but when they decided to form a young feminist fund, Nadine Moawad – she is from Lebanon – decided that she was going to champion it and ensure that AWID pulls through in forming this fund. The original idea was that AWID would incubate the fund, and after about three years they would let it be its own independent fund. Nadine was the one who reached out to me and said, this is the concept note and we are thinking of starting a young feminist fund. Would you be interested in applying to be one of the advisors?’”
Purity could not attend the meeting in Beirut that would serve as the birthplace of the first global young feminist fund, because she was denied a visa to Lebanon. “Can you imagine? It was heart-breaking!” Despite this, “that energy of Lebanon, I’m telling you! The last meeting I went to for FRIDA was in 2014, and people still refer to that meeting like it happened yesterday. We weren’t even sure we would raise the money. We weren’t even sure we’d be there for a year. People spent time hosting parties and speaking to people to give money to FRIDA, so that sort of commitment I feel came from that meeting in Beirut.”
“One thing I really learnt from FRIDA is, put your money where your heart is. That thing of FRIDA giving money to young women who had never had any funding before is part of what I do. Part of my programme is to give seed funding to social entrepreneurs from across East Africa, and I give it on the basis that I trust that what you are saying you will do, you will do. Yes, you’ll have ups and downs of learning, but I’m willing to commit to ensuring there are more young women in these spaces…if we want to work with young women, we need to be very deliberate about including them.”
