MAPENAI KILENA
Mapenai Kilena is a grassroots feminist, survivor advocate, gender specialist, and storyteller from Kajiado County. She serves as the Kajiado County Focal Person for the Youth Anti-FGM Network Kenya (YANK), where she works with women, girls, and young people to challenge harmful practices, promote bodily autonomy, and strengthen community led responses to gender-based violence.
Mapenai describes herself as calm, reflective, and intentional. She values honesty, kindness, and respect, and believes that strength does not always have to be loud to be powerful. Her work is grounded in empathy, listening, and a deep commitment to helping women and girls live with dignity and freedom.
Growing up in the Maasai community, FGM was presented as something normal and expected. Every girl was assumed to go through it, and questioning it was rare. Mapenai almost became a victim of FGM herself. She remembers the fear and confusion of not fully understanding what was about to happen to her. Although she was not cut, the experience stayed with her. Later, watching her close relatives undergo FGM and suffer deeply made the reality of the practice impossible to ignore. That pain became the turning point that pushed her into advocacy. She decided that other girls should not have to experience the same fear, silence, or suffering.
Today, Mapenai works on issues of FGM, child marriage, gender-based violence, mental health, and sexual and reproductive health. Her work focuses on creating spaces where girls and young women can speak openly, learn about their rights, and access support without fear or judgment. She also collaborates with community leaders, youth groups, faith leaders, and local organisations to encourage collective action and community ownership of change.
Over the years, she has directly worked with around 1,500 young women and girls. She has supported the rescue and safe settlement of more than 30 girls who were at risk of FGM and other forms of violence, facilitated dialogues with opinion leaders and faith leaders, led an End Defilement Campaign in Magadi during a surge in rape and defilement cases, and used both community forums and social media to amplify conversations around FGM, sexual and gender-based violence, and sexual and reproductive health and rights.
One story continues to remind her why this work matters. A young girl who was about to undergo FGM was rescued through their intervention. The girl was terrified and had no one to speak for her. After being connected to a safe place, she later told Mapenai that she wanted to return to school and become someone who helps other girls. Today, that same girl is in her first year studying Law at the University of Nairobi. For Mapenai, this was proof that advocacy is not only about awareness campaigns, it is about changing the direction of someone’s life and restoring the ability to dream again.
The journey has not been easy. Speaking against FGM in a community where it is deeply normalised can lead to misunderstanding, resistance, and isolation. Changing beliefs that have existed for generations requires patience, trust, and consistent engagement. Limited resources have also made it difficult to reach more girls and sustain long-term programmes. Yet these challenges have strengthened her commitment rather than weakening it.
What makes Mapenai’s approach unique is the way she connects activism to everyday life. Instead of relying only on formal meetings, she uses storytelling, sports, social media, and open community conversations to make discussions around FGM, SGBV, and SRHR more relatable and less intimidating, especially for young people in rural and pastoralist communities. Her lived experience also helps build trust, because people know she speaks from real situations rather than theory.
Her work is guided by feminist values of justice, dignity, equality, solidarity, safety, and courage. She believes women and girls should be heard, respected, and able to make decisions about their own bodies and futures. To her, sisterhood means women choosing one another, protecting one another, and creating spaces where they can heal, grow, and rise together without fear of judgment or competition.
Mapenai sees the Sister to Sister Initiative as a space for connection, learning, and emotional support among women advocates. She believes it strengthens grassroots work by reminding women that they are not alone, offering opportunities for mentorship and skills-sharing, and helping young feminist leaders grow with confidence and care.
Speaking about Kajiado, Mapenai describes a community deeply rooted in pastoralist culture, where values such as unity, resilience, respect for elders, and mutual support remain strong. She also acknowledges that harmful beliefs about FGM, girls’ education, and women’s roles still persist. At the same time, she sees encouraging change: more families are prioritising education for girls, young people are becoming more outspoken, and elders and faith leaders are increasingly open to dialogue. She wants the world to see not only the challenges facing her community, but also its strength, intelligence, and capacity for transformation.
Looking ahead, Mapenai dreams of a future where girls and women are free, safe, educated, and fully in control of their lives and bodies. She hopes to build and strengthen safe spaces where girls can learn, speak, heal, and lead, and to contribute to shaping policies that centre the voices of women and girls from pastoralist communities. Most of all, she wants to see a generation of girls who grow up without fear, with choices, confidence, and the freedom to define their own future.
Every story I tell is also a question to the systems that allowed it.
The African Women’s Rights Advocates (AWRA) is a dynamic, survivor-led movement founded by African women across the continent and in the diaspora.
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