BIDII WOMEN GROUP

Bidii Women Group was launched in 2003 by women whose activities centred on economic empowerment for the sole purpose of ensuring that their children's education and social life continued irrespective of the circumstances in which they found themselves.

The Group currently is composed of 10 women of likeminded operating from Chesamis in Ngong Division of Kajiado District. The district lies approximately 50 kilometres on the South East of Nairobi in the Rift Valley Province of Kenya . The women all come from the nomadic community of Masaai tribe in Kenya .

The Community of Masaai is not well advanced in championing the education of the girl-child. The women have resolved to do all they can to guarantee quality education for their daughters and ensure that they are not married off prematurely in accordance with the Masaai culture. The girlchild`s fate is further made difficult due to repugnant cultural practices that forces young girls between the age of 10 to 13 to undergo female genital circumcision (FGM) . Culturally, the young girls must get married immediately after the excersise.

THE OBJECTIVES

•  To engage in socio-economic activities for the betterment of their daily and family lives

•  To ensure that through income generation activities, the education of their

children is sustained

•  To look ways and means that would assist the women secure water for domestic and animal husbandry at a manageable distance from their homesteads.

•  To address the following problems:-

•  To initiate programmes that creates awareness among the women about their reproductive rights, general health and the HIV/AIDS pandemic.

•  Food security

•  Provision and secure clean water supply both for human and animal consumption .( see proposal)

•  Secure safer and acceptable process for girls entering womanhood i.e. the (Right of Passage) as an alternative way to overcoming early school dropouts among the young girls.

•  Improved animal husbandry.

•  Poverty Eradication programmes.