Sponsored Arts for Education (SAFE) uses theatre to educate communities in Kenya about HIV/AIDS. Prospero brought in donations from 3 separate funders, fully funding a pilot programme for the Maasai about preventing female circumcision. In one year, SAFE reached 19,500 in a community of 30,000.
"A unique feature of Prospero is its ability to identify viable pilot projects and connect them with donors willing to take the risk of supporting new or potentially controversial ideas. In this case, we were dealing with issues that people can be nervous to get involved with but the Maasai were at a point where they were willing to consider a change to the fabric of their culture and it was essential to harness this momentum.
The funding that we received through Prospero has been a catalyst for a change that far exceeds the value of the initial investment."
Sophie Bray, Programme Director at SAFE
Beneficiary's story
In February 2008, Naserian, one of SAFE's outreach officers was approached
by a 12 year old girl, Nalango. She desperately did not want to be circumcised,
but her ceremony was planned for the next month. Circumcision is usually
followed by marriage. Nalango was at school and wanted to go on to university
and become a doctor. Circumcision and marriage would mean the end of these
dreams.
Nalango's mother was a traditional surgeon who made money, and got significant community respect, by circumcising girls. This made it all the more complicated for Nalango to see any way of getting out of being circumcised.
Naserian approached the family to discuss the possibility of Nalango undergoing the alternative rite of passage. After working with them intensively for a month, the family agreed. Nalango was not cut, she is still in school and she has become a youth leader in the campaign for change. Her parents are both volunteers with SAFE's Advocate For Change Network, and Nalango's mother is leading the campaign for change amongst the traditional surgeons. The family are working with SAFE to extend the abandonment programme to reach all Maasai communities in Kenya and Tanzania.
SAFE's story
We
received funding through Prospero to start the first Female Genital Cutting
(FGC) Abandonment programme amongst the Maasai in the Loita Hills of South
West Kenya. The practice of FGC is universal amongst the Maasai. In Loita,
approximately 2,000 girls are circumcised every year.
FGC is an internationally and culturally controversial issue. There is great debate on the topic but very little consensus about how to approach this cultural rite in the context of an increasingly global community. Many people from cultures that practice FGC are engaged in trying to reduce or abandon the practice but very few are given the opportunity that was created by the donors who funded the SAFE pilot programme through Prospero.
SAFE had already spent 18 months working with the Maasai community in Loita to design how best to approach this highly sensitive and culturally entrenched practice. We estimated that it would take three years to introduce the concept of abandonment into the community.
The pilot programme surpassed all organisational and community expectations. In just one year, we recruited half of the female circumcisers to SAFE's Advocate for Change Network to begin the campaign against FGC, set up clubs in all the district schools and youth groups in all the market centres to advocate for change, trained teachers and local organisations and held events to get the community discussing the possibility of an alternative rite of passage.
Now we are working with 25 families who want to adopt this alternative rite. In June 2009, just 14 months after starting the Abandonment programme, all the Community Leaders organised a meeting, attended by 2,000 community members, to call an end to the practice. This was met with cheers. In 2007, these very same community members had told us that to leave a girl uncut was a social aberration so feared that the girl would be cast out of the community.
Prospero's story
SAFE was immediately interesting, being a small organisation which successfully used theatre techniques in their work on HIV/AIDS prevention. Amongst the Maasai, SAFE was already using traditional storytelling techniques to incorporate messages about HIV/AIDS prevention, and were currently designing a pilot programme to use similar techniques to prevent the practise of female genital cutting.
The modest size of the pilot project (£25,000 for 2 years of a 3-year pilot), the expertise and background demonstrated and the impact if such techniques could be shown to work, were compelling. We felt that if we could find the whole of the pilot's first year funding for SAFE, they could get on with their work and not have to worry about raising funds.
We successfully introduced SAFE and their work to Prospero contacts; In total, we raised £29,000 for them.
The pilot was so successful that they were able to complete the pilot in 1 year, rather than in 3 and to leverage international partnerships and funding as a consequence.. This has been an extremely satisfactory partnership for Prospero and we are proud that our initial interest has enabled SAFE to prove the viability of its techniques in providing alternative ceremonies and educating the Maasai on the dangerous effects of female circumcision. SAFE now also has an operational model for the prevention of female circumcision that can be adapted for use throughout Africa.
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