Target Project 2023–2025
Organization: Safe Spaces
Location: Nairobi, Kenya
The Project
Awesome Blossoms is the latest evolution of a community-based organization, Safe Spaces, created by Mrs. Peninah Nthenya Musyimi. This project features organic, water-efficient urban farms with 500 gardens in each farm to support girls’ education and empowerment programs and with 75 women in partnership with three primary schools located in the Mathare slum area of Nairobi. Watch the Announcement Presentation Slideshow.
Background:
Founder/Director Peninah Nthenya Musyimi is the first woman from Nairobi’s slums to work her way
through university to qualify as a lawyer. She realized that a systematic integrated approach is needed to address the root causes of poverty and violence. In 2008 she returned to the slums to establish “Safe Spaces.”
Watch Peninah’s Story
Our Motto: “I’m the change.”
Each girl learns she has the power to lead her own life and achieve her dreams. “I’m the change” underlines the importance of self-empowerment for these girls. Each girl learns that she has the power to voice her ambitions, change her community and achieve her dreams. She has the power to become a role model and a leader in the community by taking responsibility, driving her own life, and working to achieve her own goals.
Our philosophy: “Each one, teach one.”
This philosophy emphasizes the power – and responsibility – each girl has to give back and to lead change. It encourages older girls at Safe Spaces to volunteer and act as role models and share knowledge and experiences with the younger girls. Girls first learn a skill and share it forward. Safe Spaces’ Peer Educators Program trains girls who go through their programs to become Peer Educators and teaches them how to teach. This creates a ripple effect into families and the community as well.
Our Ambition: Educate, Engage, Empower!
Population Served: Our education, sports, life-skills and reproductive health programs annually serve more than 1200 girls, aged 5-22, and their mothers. Community outreach creates broader support for their development and a ripple effect of empowerment and education.
Through arts, culture and sports programs, educational scholarships, Peer Educators and reproductive health training, Safe Spaces raises awareness and helps keep girls in school longer, eliminate child marriages and reduce early pregnancies. Our mission is to create and provide a safe space in the Eastland slums of Nairobi for girls and young women to learn, develop and grow into strong, qualified women who can escape poverty, violence and systematic exclusion and go on to become confident leaders and problem-solvers in the communities. Our vision is to progressively eliminate social and economic gender inequalities by empowering women to become confident leaders and problem-solvers in their communities. We aim to build a stronger generation of young women with independent minds who go after what they want to achieve in life, act
as role models and take leadership positions in their community to drive sustainable development and change.
Impacts
Impact on the environment/climate: The need for local, healthy and sustainably produced food in the slums is critical, especially as climate change negatively impacts the availability of reliable rains, food production and food choices in disadvantaged neighborhoods.
Addressing gender equality: Awesome Blossoms features an ingenious vertical hydroponic food system which is compact and produces consistent yields. Systematic use of organic foliar biopesticides and fungicides reduces the risk of exposure to synthetic chemicals, which contribute significantly to environmental pollution. The project would positively impact the entire community by improving access to healthy food options. Women and girls in the program would develop valuable skills in organic hydroponic farming, gain nutritional advice through specific workshops and increase economic empowerment by learning and managing the various steps – from production to delivery – of this aspect of agribusiness.
Supporting the community: The leadership is assured in-country, with a strong representation of female staff members. They are embedded in the local community via a strong network of volunteers.
Achieving/reaching sustainability: Both commercial contracts with local hotels and land lease agreements on whose land the produce would be grown have been finalized. As a social enterprise project, the proceeds from Awesome Blossom’s sales of crops will be reinvested in the various, ongoing Safe Spaces programs (trainings on reproductive health and life skills, micro-entrepreneurship, sports and arts programs) in order to create a path towards self-reliance for all programs.
SDGs addressed (using UN icons):
- Images of an urban farm pilot program (2019). Fifteen Peer Educators gained vocational training, while 72 women micro-entrepreneurs used the systems to produce food for low-income households.
For additional information, you are invited to learn more about the organization by visiting the Safe Spaces website:
https://www.safespaces-nairobi.org/ and its social media platforms.
Safe Spaces short introduction
Donations: fawcofoundation.org
