Podcast: A Football-Loving Lawyer Moves The Goalpost On Girls' Rights In Kenya

This is a heart-warming podcast episode about a human-rights lawyer from Northern Kenya who is using football to change her community. 

Fatuma Abdulkadir Adan has personal experience of the internal conflicts in northern Kenyan society. Her father is from the Borana people, her mother is Gabra and her husband is ethnically Rendille: three groups who have historically clashed over water, pastureland and cattle.

Adan founded the Horn of Africa Development Initiative with the aim of bringing communities together and promoting the rights of women and girls, through education as well as one of Adan’s main passions, football. Now there are 1,645 girls playing in the league she has set up.

She talks about her life growing up in a very remote part of Kenya with a very supportive father who prioritized her education. As other girls were pulled out of school to be married off young, she continued her education up until university. Her father had great hopes for her to work in Nairobi as a lawyer, but her love for her community brought her back home. She's been using football to bring fighting communities together. What she's doing might sound simple, but by using the sport and allowing girls to play, she's pushing against gender and cultural norms that make a woman's primary priority marriage and child birth. She uses her NGO and the sport to change the way the community views girls and to encourage families to keep girls in school.

She lives by the principles she's teaching the girls. She intentionally chose not to marry until she was "old" by her community's standards. When she did marry, she married for love – choosing her own husband. She married a man from a community that is a rival to her own. By living life in her own unique way in a community where girls don't see different ways of living, she's inspiring a new generation.