Amara the Hero and Other Stories
Using storytelling to educate children on their protection rights
ICHRK through funding from Amplify Change developed a child-friendly storybook titled Amara the Hero and Other Stories that positions the different challenges affecting child protection in the coastal region while educating children on their rights to protection against violation. ICRHK together with the Department of Health executed nine book tours for the Amara storybook across nine schools within Jomvu and Kisauni sub-counties. This activity was in collaboration with an in-house project, Linda Mtoto that runs life skills programs in the selected schools as part of a child protection initiative.
We worked with a primary narrator to execute the tours but to ascertain added buy-in and ownership, we also worked with 6 public health officers who were co-narrators and took the children through the concurrently running life-skill sessions. We had 450 children directly participate in the tours through narration and storytelling. Indirect beneficiaries envisioned to benefit from the storybook via engagement with library copies and peers are 6750. This storybook is the first of its kind in Mombasa County. We anticipate that it will be used as a benchmark for child-friendly programming at the County level.
Amara Gallery
Facing Violence II
Globally, sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) is a particularly disconcerting occurrence that affects all populations, with Kenya not being an exception to this form of brutality. It refers to any harmful act that is perpetrated against one person’s will, and that is based on socially ascribed (gender) differences between males and females. It includes acts that inflict physical, mental, or sexual harm or suffering, threats of such acts, coercion and other deprivations of liberty, whether occurring in public or in private life1. In Kenya, SGBV as a complex issue, has its roots in the structural inequalities between men and women, resulting in the persistence of power differentials between the sexes. Gender norms and attitudes that perpetuate women’s subordinate status to men in many Kenyan societies, coupled with a general acceptance of interpersonal violence as a means of resolving conflicts, renders women disproportionately vulnerable to violence from all levels of society.
Facing Violence II: “In my own Words” book tells the stories of those who overcame the most inhumane of acts and from it, got the courage to tell their stories, with the hope that the stories will empower each member of the community to take individual interest and action
The Book can be downloaded below”
