A Maasai woman, pushing for change

There is room for change even in a culture you respect, says Maanda Ngoitiko, a leader who has challenged the status quo of what it means to be female in a pastoralist Maasai society. Ngoitiko grew up in the traditional, male-dominated pastoralist community of Soit Sambu village in northern Tanzania, helping with the needs of her family and their cattle. To escape forced marriage and in hopes of continuing her education, a 15-year-old Ngoitiko ran away from home. After finishing secondary school in Dar es Salaam with the help of a pastoralist community group, she received sponsorship from the Irish embassy to further her education in Europe. Ngoitiko then returned to northern Tanzania to work for a Maasai community organization, but she realized there was an urgent need for an organization led and managed by Maasai women, dedicated solely to addressing their strategic and practical needs. She wanted to help girls in the same situation as she herself had once been in, desperate for an education but unsure of how to access one. In 1997, she helped found the Pastoral Women’s Council and has led the organization – now 6,000 members strong and two districts wide – ever since. Ngoitiko shared with Devex how she strives to find the balance between respecting Maasai culture while creating change by promoting gender equality and boosting the pride, solidarity and economic well-being of women in her district and surrounding areas. Traditional Maasai society is rather male-dominated. How did you begin the Pastoral Women’s Council in spite of this? Before I helped begin the Pastoral Women’s Council, we felt as women that our issues were not being adequately addressed by any organizations or smaller women’s groups that already existed. We held a big meeting with 500 women in 1997 – that was the day 10 Maasai women present at the meeting decided we needed our own forum to address our own issues. So the Pastoral Women’s Council was pioneered by those 10 women, myself included. We are all 10 still very active members of the council, and some are still on the board. After that meeting, we began to work closely together, identifying potential girls to go to school, but we didn’t have any funding. We spent three years speaking with communities and groups about women’s issues and the importance of women’s leadership. Finally, we began to secure both local and international funding and started a scholarship program for girls who wished to continue with secondary school but lacked financial support. In the beginning, it was really difficult to make a change. But we could count on women’s groups already established in the community, and men who supported women. So you work with men, too? We are not a discriminative organization, so we also work with men as indirect beneficiaries. We have 10 board members – two men and eight women – who are elected by the general assembly, which consists of all members of the organization, close to 6,000 women now. We decided to invite the two men on the board – one is a lawyer, the other works in finance – because they can represent the interests of women anywhere they go outside the council too. It was good to involve men; sometimes they help address gender issues in a patriarchal society because you cannot really address serious gender issues in isolation. In a pastoralist society, most decisions are still dictated by men. So we need and want the input of men who have specific interests in education or men who believe that women are equal partners. If you want to bring along lasting change, bring men into the discussion and educate them, develop relationships with them. PWC provides everything from scholarships to microcredit loans to leadership training. What types of programs is PWC currently working on? We are currently working on a program called the Women Leadership Forum, where we create a discussion between women and men in the community and speak about the importance of girls’ education, and the importance of the representation of women in politics, in decision-making. We also have a microcredit program working in two districts, one funded by a Belgian NGO, the other funded completely from community women who donate themselves. We’d like to expand upon them, but various projects have been initiated, including selling salt, sugar, cooking oil; buying and selling livestock; harvesting crops like maize and sorghum; and making beaded jewelry and crafts. The credit schemes have been so successful that today there are a total of 4,000 members over the many groups. The Women's Solidarity Bomas in two districts also facilitate their members to gain property rights and generate income through the ownership of property and revolving livestock projects, which is important in the context of Maasai society where women currently do not ordinarily own cattle in their own right. Each WSB functions as a revolving livestock exchange, where one woman receives goats and then later passes along an equal number of goats to another woman. A major priority of PWC is helping girls become self-reliant by continuing their education. I think the education of girls in pastoralist societies is so important. When you are born female, you are treated as a second-class citizen. You must be prepared to get married young, and your marriage is arranged between the parents of the husband-to-be and your own parents. There are a lot of early and forced marriages and a lot of early pregnancies. Girls’ education has been an important tool to break that cycle and give girls freedom to make their own decisions. Education is very important in Maasai society. We are experiencing a lot of difficult cases whereby a girl’s father arranges a marriage and takes a bride price, but the girl wants to go to school. So we find Pastoral Women’s Council in a situation where we are hated by the parents, by the husband-to-be, by the community… but we’ve been working closely with women’s groups in the community to help get past this. When we started, it was much harder to get any single girl to go to secondary school. Now, there are many who want to go as well as continue on to university. The bigger challenge of Pastoral Women’s Council’s work now is how we can financially support these girls – there are too many and PWC is too small to provide scholarships to the many girls who are fleeing marriage. Traditional leaders in Ngorongoro gave us a school to run in 2006. We currently have 170 girls there, but 370 girls in total, including those we support in government schools. We want to be taking 100 new students a year, but there just isn’t room. You now have five children of your own. How do you inspire your daughters and what do you hope for them? I have two boys and three girls. The firstborn is 17 and will join university in September. They know what they want to do. I’m very close to them, their dad is close to them. My daughters have to study hard and become independent women but come back and work with the community. A Swahili proverb says: “When you educate a woman, you educate a whole community.” But how challenging has it been to change perceptions around educating Maasai women? Young Maasai men will now take their daughters to school. The issue of forced marriage is ongoing, but not as serious. So I can see a lot of changes happening rapidly. A lot of women know that education is the best option, and we have a lot of meetings with both women and men. Men really feel like girls can go to school, but they are concerned over the wider impact of education in society; the challenge is how can you continue keeping and respecting Maasai culture while you are educating a young generation. How do you become educated but continue to become a Maasai? There are wonderful aspects of our culture: the culture of solidarity, of loving each other and recognizing each other, the culture of pastoralism – it’s unique, and it’s a challenge of education that it might change the way we do things. But while we are advocating, we are still stressing good aspects of the Maasai culture. So we also mentor students to make sure they develop an in-depth understanding of their own cultures. Want to learn more? Check out She Builds and tweet us using #SheBuilds. 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