Three women turn personal struggles into a mentorship movement for Kenyan girls

This story has significance for readers across Kenya and beyond.

What you need to know:

- Esther Gitaranga, Sofia Lentikaa and Brandy Venessa are using mentorship to help young people challenge harmful gender norms and GBV.

- The Nairobi initiative reaches hundreds of young people monthly with lessons on consent, HIV, healthy relationships and emotional healing.

Esther Gitaranga once queued the whole day at the University of Nairobi trying to clear her tuition fees. She was sent away in the evening with Sh500 in her pocket, not enough for a night in Nairobi, and not enough to get home either. A friend took her in that night, a woman who did not know anything about her but rescued her anyway. From that moment, helping young women stopped being an assignment and became personal.

Today, Esther is one of three women behind Binti Rising, a Nairobi-based mentorship initiative reaching hundreds of girls and young people every month. Her co-founders, Sofia Sentepian Lentikaa and Brandy Venessa, came to the same mission from different starting points, but all three now run a programme that has become their life work.

A new path

Esther, 27, grew up in a small village called Mawanga in Nakuru County. She arrived at the University of Nairobi with big dreams but little knowledge of the world she was stepping into. By second year, she was already the main campus representative of the Women Students’ Welfare Association (Woswa). She rose to become secretary general, then president. “It was a messy and chaotic time,” she says.

The higher she climbed in campus politics, the more she saw its ugly side. “Leaders won not because of good policies but because of noise, drama and rhetoric,” she says.

By her final year, she had made up her mind to build something new, away from politics. Sofia’s journey started differently but ended in the same place. The 25-year-old from the Ilchamus community grew up as the only child of her mother.

Sofia joined the University of Nairobi to study pure mathematics and was chosen as class representative, which drew her into student politics under the University of Nairobi Students Association. She won a secretary's post during the Covid-19 period, then later contested the treasurer seat but lost. “It really hurt because we used a lot of money,” she says.

Besides politics, she and a friend started Young Women for Baringo County, an organisation to mentor girls back in her home community, where few finish Grade Eight before early marriage or female genital mutilation cuts their education short. They lobbied the county government for small grants and used the money to buy supplies for mentoring young girls.

The corporate world eventually felt like home to Sofia. After her undergraduate course, she received a Mastercard Foundation scholarship for a master's programme at the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences in Cameroon, specialising in data science and artificial intelligence. Today, she works remotely from Kenya as a full-stack software engineer. “When you get into tech, you don't want all this other noise out here,” she says.

Brandy, now 29, took a different road entirely. She studied business management at St Paul's University and never chased a campus office. While her classmates fought for leadership positions, she was quietly healing from her own past, having survived sexual abuse at home. It was through Esther, then Woswa president, that she first got close to mentorship and slowly discovered where her heart truly belonged.

“Impact has always been more important than position,” she says. “I know what it feels like to carry pain in silence, and I wanted to become part of a movement that gives girls and young women hope, support, and the confidence to believe in themselves again.”

Inside the initiative

The mentorship programme runs as a structured, eight-topic curriculum delivered over four days. It moves from what it means to be a whole person, through gender norms and an exercise where participants draw their inner and outer hearts, to breaking the silence on HIV and gender-based violence (GBV), healthy relationships and consent, how media shapes people into objects, and finally repair and emotional healing.

“There is no stigma in theory. But when it comes practically next to you, that is when it becomes a problem,” Esther says.

Internal tracking shows the programme reaches roughly 240 girls every month, adding up to about 720 young people across Nairobi over the last three months. It targets those aged 15–24, split into two groups for age-appropriate content: those aged 15–18 through Shujaz content and those aged 19–24, mostly campus students, through Shuga Global's television drama.

“We give them some tests where we can capture what they had originally and then we do the last one, the post-test where we check behaviour change," Sofia says.

Young men are engaged separately as “knot holders”, because addressing perpetrators, not just survivors, is part of breaking the cycle. “In most cases, about 97 per cent of participants show a measurable shift in attitudes and behaviour by the end,” she says.

The facilitation manual is reviewed every three months based on feedback from the young beneficiaries. Esther says the programme has no formal backing from the Ministry of Education. “As an initiative, we don't have the capacity to legally handle GBV through lawyers and such. At least not yet, but it's in the plan,” she says.

When a participant discloses abuse, the team leans on the systems it has. “We mostly refer to the police or hospital because we are not fully established, we are on the path. However, we have a counsellor,” she explains.

For anyone under 18, the first step is the school counsellor, followed by direct engagement with parents to pursue legal action. Facilitators are trained by Shuga Global, which brings in outside experts for every session. “Our focus is not exactly healing, it is breaking the silence, creating a safe space, and then referring where need be,” Esther says.

What the girls say

Naomi Bosibori, 25, works in sales and marketing. She joined a session in Kiambu earlier this year, hoping to learn more about reproductive health and left with a solution to something that had troubled her for months. She had been using Depo, a contraceptive injection, without knowing it was not the right fit for her, and her periods had become unpredictable. “It took me around six months,” she says.

It was only through the sessions that she learned about other options, including the emergency pill many call P2, and finally saw a doctor and switched to a method that worked better for her. The sessions also confronted a belief she had carried since childhood that a menstruating woman should stay away from church and her own father. “We had an issue that when a woman is ovulating, you should not go to church. You should not see your dad, according to our culture,” she says.

Sitting through the sessions, she learned these were gender norms, not truths. “So far, I've seen some growth,” she says.

Faith Wambwele, 23, is a fourth-year student at the University of Nairobi. She joined the initiative in 2025 as a mental health advocate. Before helping others, she realised she first needed to understand herself.

She once viewed the world through a narrow feminist lens, but the sessions taught her about gender equality and helped her unlearn assumptions she had carried since childhood. “Through the organisation's partnership with Shujaz, we have received sanitary pads, tampons, menstrual cups, HIV test kits and access to peer counsellors, along with a new sense of self-worth,” she says.

The hard part

One of the biggest hurdles is mobilisation. Because the initiative has not secured a formal letter from the Education ministry, the team must seek consent directly from individual parents before working with teenagers aged 15–18. This slows the process considerably. Trust is another obstacle, particularly on campuses, where young people are often reluctant to use official referral centres for GBV.

Money adds its own strain. Binti Rising's mentorship work runs under Surround Sound Kenya, a wider programme delivered in partnership with Path, Shujaz and Sugar Global, and it is funded by those partners but only partially covering transport and airtime rather than every need on the ground. “It is a little difficult to handle, but we try our best,” Esther says.

Nine friends and a shared idea

The initiative began as an idea born on campus, carried forward by a team of nine friends who came together to register it as a community-based organisation, each contributing monthly to keep it running. “We are a team of nine. Through monthly contributions, we did registration,” Sofia says.

Registration costs about Sh5,000. The same monthly pooling is later paid for branded shirts and pads for early community outreach. Surround Sound Kenya began in September 2025 and Binti Rising came on board as the implementing organisation for Nairobi last January, after months of working under the same partners as facilitators. Within five years, the team wants to grow from a community-based organisation into a fully registered initiative, expanding beyond Nairobi. “Those stories continue to reassure us that choosing this path was the right decision,” Brandy says.

They also plan to move beyond sexual reproductive health into financial literacy, leadership development, and practical life solutions for issues such as debt, which they believe quietly fuels much of the mental health strain young people carry.

An outside view

Wendy Aura, founder of Young Women Leaders Connect, also consults in youth development and GBV. She says Binti's model lines up closely with good practice in the sector, particularly its choice to cover consent, HIV, gender norms, healthy relationships and emotional healing together.

“Most of the cases we've seen, especially on femicide and GBV, are perpetrated by people close to the girls or women who are the majority of the victims,” she says.

She also points to the value of engaging young men separately. “Gender-based violence is not a female issue,” she says. “The focus may shift to girls and women because of the statistics, but it doesn't mean men are not affected. It's a societal issue.”

On safeguarding, she says the fact that the initiative already has a counsellor and clear referral steps, even without formal ministry backing, shows the founders understand the responsibility rather than overlooking it.

She warns against working in isolation. “You may feel this is something you always do, but you cannot solve that problem alone. You work with hospitals, the media, you work with community leaders,” she says.

On sustaining change, she points to training mentors and peer leaders as one of the most effective models she has seen. “If you support continuation through the people you've trained, that model has a multiplier effect, because you can't reach everyone yourself.”

Reporting originally appeared via Nation Africa. Read the full source for additional context.