August 12 is the designated International Youth Day, particularly serving as the annual celebration of the role of the youth highlighting their initiatives, voices and action. In Tanzania as with many places in the world, the youth were able to celebrate by sharing various messages on social media and other platforms, participating in workshops as […]
Across East Africa, a repressive tide against freedom of expression continues to rise through punitive laws being passed by the day. On 5 June 2020, the Kenya government printer published the Statute Law (Miscellaneous Amendments) Bill 2020 which includes proposed changes to the Film and Stage Plays Act 1962 (Cap 222) to give the Kenya […]
Press Release Nairobi, 11 August 2020-Statistics from the UN indicate that at least 200 million girls and women alive today have had their genitals mutilated – suffering one of the most inhumane acts of gender-based violence in the world. Reverend Timothy Njoya, a retired Minister of the Presbyterian Church of East Africa and a leading […]
Therese Nyirarugo lived with a man who sexually and verbally abused her; but she didn’t want to tell anybody about it. Maybe he would one day ‘change’, she thought. Then she conceived his baby. He chased her away and denied paternity of the child. Haguruka sued him on her behalf. The court ordered that the […]
Stephanie Muchai: a passionate champion of open government July 28, 2020 Stephanie Muchai is Hivos’ current East Africa lead for the global Open Up Contracting program. Open contracting aims to support governments to procure and deliver public goods and services for citizens efficiently and transparently. She works directly with local, national and regional partners towards more open […]
‘Transparency and openness of governments helps people to trust that institutions will deliver for them.’ These are the words of the late Bob Collymore when he reflected on the sources of distrust between citizens and their governments in 2017. He went on to say that indeed, majority of the world has lost trust in […]
Civil Society Organisations under Hivos East Africa’s Women@Work Campaign and the Kenya Flower Council (KFC) today dispatched food packages and mobile money transfers worth approximately 75,000 euros (equivalent to KES 8 Million) to workers in selected flower farms. A total of 7,000 workers in the flower sector are set to receive the rations as a […]
Written by Nout van der Vaart, Hivos Advocacy Officer Sustainable Food At last week’s 2020 High Level Political Forum (HLPF), UN member states discussed how to get back on track to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in light of the Covid-19 pandemic. They focused on a dire need for “accelerated action and transformative pathways […]
On May 25 2020, George Floyd lay tragically on the concrete taking his last breath for nine minutes as his life was taken from him. This instance would be a catalyst to one of the largest protests and movements seen worldwide. The global out-pouring and support to end systemic racism has been visible to not […]
Dear Reader, I welcome you to our 2019 annual report. This report features our work in East Africa where we have been championing just and fair societies since we started working in the region over 50 years ago. 2019 was a year filled with interesting twists and turns but such times only gave us the […]
The uphill battle for musicians in East Africa
As a form of free expression, music has unlimited scope for communicating joy, sorrow or hope. Music tells the story of the human condition through sound.
Working together with communities and investing in their social capacity are the key to success in the transition to 100% electric cooking, shows the new “Beyond Fire: Backcasting a pathway to fully electric cooking in rural Kenya by 2030” released by Hivos and the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI). This new report calls for a better understanding […]