Pitt grad returns to home village in Kenya to empower girls

Girls in Kakenya Ntaiya’s village get married instead of finishing school, but she didn’t want to follow tradition. Instead, she and her  father made a deal. 

She could stay in school, but she still had to submit to another common rite of passage.

According to her website, Ntaiya agreed to undergo the excruciating pain of genital mutilation in exchange for permission to continue her education. 

Now, more than 20 years later, Ntaiya runsruns a school for girls in her home village, which is located in a region of southern Kenya where female children have limited opportinities and are often victimized by genital mutilation and forced into early marriage. 

Ntaiya’s work to empower girls in her village and throughout the region of Kenya in which the village is located has made her one of 10 nominees for this year’s CNN Hero of the Year award, which, according to its website, honors “everyday people changing the world.” CNN delivers its annual Hero of the Year award to the finalist chosen by online voters, who can vote until Nov. 17. The winner will be announced Dec. 1 and will receive a $250,000 prize. 

After  she graduated from high school, she traveled to the United States in 2000 to attend college on a scholarship at Randolph-Macon Woman’s College in Virginia and to pursue her dream of building a girls’ school in her home village in Kenya.

After adjusting to American culture, she began to understand that what transpired in her small village — including the systematic genital mutilation of girls and the beating of women — were, in fact, against Kenyan law. Ntaiya was enraged and became determined to make a change that mattered. 

Ntaiya was eager to complete her doctoral work at Pitt even after establishing the Kakenya’s Dream Foundation, a foundation based in Washington, D.C., in 2008.

The following year, Ntaiya started an elementary school called the Kakenya Center for Excellence in her home village. The school is supported through her foundation’s fundraising efforts.

“I believe very much [that] when you give someone vital and accurate information, they will make the right decision,” Ntaiya said. “That is what has happened to the girls in our school.”

She chose Pitt after receiving another scholarship and establishing strong connections with Kenyan graduate students at Pitt. She completed her doctorate in 2011.

Noreen Garman, a professor of education at Pitt and Ntaiya’s mentor, said she considers Ntaiya part of her extended family.

“Here’s a young woman who started her elementary school without paper and pencil,” Garman said. “She was remarkable in the sense that she had so little in the beginning and was able to do all that.”

Ntaiya first connected with Garman through Garman’s sister, Kathy Bonk, who completed her undergraduate education at Pitt and now works as a political activist in Washington, D.C.

It was Bonk who offered space in her office for Ntaiya to begin Kakenya’s Dream.

Last year Pushpa Basnet won CNN’s Hero of the Year award for starting a home in Kathmandu, Nepal, for children whose parents are incarcerated.

This year, Ntaiya is up against several power players in the competition to change the world. 

Richard Nares, another nominee, founded Ride with Emilio after he lost his son Emilio to cancer in 2000. Nares started his foundation by personally providing rides to and from hospital visits for children from low-income families who have cancer. Others now join him in providing the rides. 

Dr. Laura Stachel, another nominee, is an obstetrician who created “solar suitcases” to provide light and the necessary electrical equipment to safely deliver babies in developing nations such as Nigeria, where she visited for two weeks in 2008. 

Ntaiya is also competing against Danielle Gletow, who in 2008 founded One Simple Wish, a nonprofit foundation based in Trenton, N.J., for children in the foster care system. 

Gletow and her husband, Joe, initially became involved with the foster care system when they decided to start their family through adoption. After some research, Gletow realized the prevalent gaps between “the care the children require and the care available.”

One Simple Wish allows children to post their wishes, which could be anything from new shoes to a trip to an amusement park, on a website. Then, anyone can donate money online to help make the children’s wishes come true. 

“One of the biggest gaps is that there are not enough qualified parents,” she said. “You’re removing a child from an unstable environment and placing them into an equally unstable environment.” 

Whatever the outcome of the competition, Garman was confident that her friend’s work would make a very real difference in girls’ lives.

“We’re not talking about a little village school,” Garman said. “We’re talking about a school that has 21st century possibilities for Kenyan girls.”