By Seline Nyangere
Kajiado County, Kenya: Cases of Gender Based Violence (GBV) are still on the rise in Kajiado County. An event that has led to poverty in homes and school dropouts among children. This has pushed the Kajiado Gender sector working group to come up with policies and acts to fight GBV.
During a workshop on the fight against GBV, Kajiado Gender Director, Mary Taiko revealed to the media that, based on the county’s GBV status, they have decided to work together with all gender stakeholders and suppress the situation.
“We are in the process of coming up with a policy to fight Gender Violence, we have been conversing with the Gender Sector Working Group and Gender, Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) and listening to the actions they want us to take to stop cases of GBV. Based on our statistics, we are at 34%, which is very high compared to the national statistics, fortunately, we have also come up with strategies to use on our children when they come back for holiday dialogues and mentorship programs on this matter”, revealed Taiko.
According to Naisai Karia, the chair of the gender committee in Kajiado County, unfortunately, most people do not understand that GBV cuts across all genders, and for this reason they have decided to involve different sectors such as the police, ministry of Education, health and gender to educate and assist people understand GBV and possible actions to take.
“When we talk about GBV we are not talking about violence against women, Gender is for both male and female, people do not like to talk about it but we have men who have been violated, some people in society also mistreat and violate the elders and young boys so we are looking for ways to prevent it from happening. We are working hand in hand with the gender department, we have also brought in the health department because they are the first-hand contact, we are also working with the Department of Education to solve this problem”, said Karia.
The GBV policy being designed by the stakeholders is supposed to help the county think of creating safe homes for GBV survivors and according to Nancy Sitima, the Chef Executive Officer Forum for Women in Development, Democracy and Justice, the policies they are creating will cut across all departments including the establishment of publicly funded safe houses.
“We want to ensure that Kajiado County has a GBV policy and again we sort to establish exactly the ground in which we can be able to stand on when tackling GBV. We want policies and acts which will help all agencies in this department to address GBV, administration of justice to the perpetrators, access safe spaces to the survivors of violence and all institutions involved able to coordinate quick administration of justice and services to survivors”, said Sitima.
The proposed document on GBV is yet to be finalized. After the finalization of the document with stakeholders, it will be presented to the Kajiado County assembly to be tabled and implanted.
