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This year, 2018, marks 15 years since the death of Wahome Mutahi (1954 – 2003), who was one of Kenya’s most prolific fiction writers, as well as a playwright, columnist, political satirist, pundit and public opinion leader. He was popularly known as Whispers after the name of the column he wrote for The Daily Nation from 1982 to 2003, offering a satirical view of the trials and tribulations of Kenyan life. According to George Ogola in The Idiom of Age in a Popular Kenyan Newspaper Serial, at a time when the state had all but monopolized public sites of expression in the country, Whispers kept the Kenyan popular media porous, opening up spaces for the discussion of social and political issues that could otherwise only be ‘whispered’. It became the most visible site of social, cultural and political expression for the last two decades at a time when freedom to such expression was highly constrained by the state.

Twaweza Communications

Gender

Female Genital Mutilation and The Dilemma of Consent

Every year approximately 3 million girls undergo female genital mutilation globally according to the statistics by the World Health Organization (WHO). What this essentially means is that parents of more than three million girls allow their daughters to undergo female genital mutilation (FGM) in order to conform to social traditions. Individual families who opt not to have their daughters undergo FGM, risk stigmatization and social exclusion, particularly in communities where the practice is rampant. Globally, it is estimated that around 200 million girls and women alive today have undergone some sort of Female Genital Mutilation.

Kenya Appeal Court Rules to End Forced Examinations of Men Suspected of Being Gay

On Thursday 22nd March 2018, a three judge bench handed down a ruling in a case appealing the state’s cruel and degrading treatment of two Kenyan men while under arrest in 2015. The men were arrested in Kwale County, on assertion that they were gay.

Democracy

Kenya Arts Diary 2018 Arts Exhibition

The Kenya Arts Diary exhibition ran from 25th October - 4th November 2017, profiling some of the works featured in this year's edition of the diary.

Welcome to Somali Heritage Week 2017

Somali Heritage Week is back this year with the theme being Enhancing Inclusivity. The event will run from 5th October to 8th October 2017 at Kenya Cultural Centre. Doors open at 9:00am till 7:00pm every day. Entry is free for all audiences.

Environment

Call for Applications: Programme Researcher for the Human Right to Food Initiative

We are looking for a full-time Programme Researcher for the Human Right to Food Initiative (HRFI). The HFRI is a programme that implements an innovative communications and influencer-led approach to the problem of chronic food insecurity in Kenya.

Anti-Coal Demonstrators in Kenya March to Deliver Demands to Parliament and the President

In commemorating World Environment Day on 5th June 2018, anti-coal activists across Kenya including from Lamu and Kitui held the #CoalNiSumu (Coal is Poison) demonstration in Nairobi, Kenya. About 250 people participated in the peaceful march through the Central Business District.

It was the first anti-coal demonstration in Nairobi, but just the latest action by the deCOALonize movement (www.decoalonize.org).

Listen to the latest Podcast (http://www.otherwisepodcast.com/episodes/episode-55-decoalonize/)

This Nairobi event follows a peaceful anti-coal demonstration in Lamu two weeks ago, in which two activists were arrested for public assembly and face possible charges.

deCOALonize movement

Podcast

International Dialogue

RE-IMAGINING NAIROBI: Better Planning for the City

According to Re-Imagining Nairobi, a striking part of the discourse around issue based politics in Kenya and the future of Kenya is the lack of room to imagine. We are often mired in the “what is” and the “this is Kenya” conversations, allowing room for marginal improvements at best and cynicism at worst. But what if we expanded the space for imagination, to accommodate possibilities to imagine for instance a Nairobi where public spaces are important and designed to work for the intended users both aesthetically and functionally? Spaces where fundamentals for urban spaces like footpaths and organized traffic flow are prioritized in development planning. Re-Imagining Nairobi is serializing conversations intended to open discussions to include...what Nairobi could be. The very first conversation in the series is focused on addressing Nairobi’s congestion problem.

reimagining nairobi

Extra-Judicial Killings and Enforced Disappearances in Kenya: Balancing the Respect for Human Rights and Maintaining National Security

The Annual All Kenyan Moot Court Competition was held on the 23rd and 24th March 2018 at the Kenyatta University School of Law, supported by the Heinrich Boell Foundation with 200 students participating from 12 different universities across the country. This year’s theme was: “Striking the Balance between Respect for Human Rights and Maintaining National Security.”

While Kenya signed the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance (ICPPED), it has not ratified the Convention, and consequently the existing legal framework falls short of international human right standards, and is thus unable to comprehensively deal with the problem

Newest Publications

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Since the third wave of democratisation swept through the continent in the 1990s, the majority of African states have replaced military dictatorships and one-party-dominant systems with more democratic forms of governance. Today, 61 percent of sub-Saharan countries are “free” or “partly free” according to Freedom House’s 2018 survey – although this is down from a high of 71 percent in 2008.

Events

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Sep 25

Nominate or Elect: Realising the "Not More Than Two-Thirds Gender Principle"

Nairobi

Ocean Atlas 2017

The Ocean Atlas illustrates the important role played by the ocean and its ecosystems – not only for people living on the coasts but for all of us. It aims to give a current insight of the state and the threat of the seas, that are our livelihoods.

Latest Publications

Catch up with all our latest publications.

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Which African leaders qualify as an icon? Perhaps this is always a controversial question, but it was much easier to answer, say, 25 years ago, when the public memories of Pan-Africanist champions such as Kwame Nkrumah and Julius Nyerere were still fresh, Nelson Mandela had just walked out of prison, and Robert Mugabe was a widely respected leader.

Somali Heritage Week 2016

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Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung

Celebrating Whispers 15 Years On: How Satire Can Further Civic Discourse