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Josephine Kulea
Girls' rights advocate
She helped girls reach safety and stay in school.
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- Community
Josephine Kulea founded the Samburu Girls Foundation to support girls facing child marriage and other harmful practices. Its work combines protection with access to education and support beyond an immediate rescue.
Her contribution has drawn international recognition, including acknowledgement during Barack Obama's 2015 visit to Kenya. The work centres on a practical question: what support does a girl need to make a safe and lasting choice about her future?
Life and work
Josephine Kulea is a Kenyan women's rights campaigner. Rescued from female genital mutilation and forced marriage as a child, she has since set up the Samburu Girls Foundation, which has saved more than 1,000 girls from similar practices. Kulea was recognised as an "unsung heroine" by US ambassador to Kenya Michael Ranneberger in 2011.
After graduating as a nurse, Kulea refused an arranged marriage to a businessman. Her nursing training taught her that FGM was not a usual practice, and that its use in Samburu did not accord with the situation in other communities. Kulea received funding in 2008 to help her to rescue other girls from Samburu, Laikipia, and Isiolo. One of the first rescues she carried out was of her two cousins, one of whom was to be married at the age of 10, and then her sister who, at the age of 7, had been made to replace her. She managed to have her uncles, who were behind the practice, arrested (FGM and child marriage were made illegal in Kenya in 2011).
Kulea founded the Samburu Girls Foundation in 2012, and by September of that year it had rescued 56 girls and helped to arrange their secondary education. Additionally, thirteen of the girls' babies had been placed into children's homes. Kulea works alongside the police and the wife of Samburu West MP Simeon Lesrima. She relies on a network of informants to let them know when illegal practices are taking place. She also hosts a radio programme to raise awareness of the illegal practices and inform people of her foundation. By the end of 2016, she is said to have saved more than 1,000 girls from FGM and forced marriage.
The foundation's combination of protection and education is central to understanding Kulea's contribution. Leaving an unsafe situation is an immediate necessity; being able to remain safe and continue school is a longer commitment. Her work directs attention to that continuing responsibility.
Her nursing background is relevant to the form of care involved. Protection is not only a public declaration that a practice is wrong. It can require accommodation, schooling, health support and people prepared to remain involved when the immediate attention has passed.
Kulea's work also depends on cooperation. Relatives, teachers, officials and community contacts can help identify a danger or create a safe alternative. The founder's visibility should not obscure that wider network. Her contribution includes building an organisation through which those relationships can support girls over time, rather than treating a single rescue as the end of the story.
That sustained support gives practical meaning to the rights her advocacy seeks to defend.
This section adapts selected passages from Josephine Kulea by Wikipedia contributors. It is shared under CC BY-SA 4.0. Selected and edited passages, with additional editorial context; lists and reference markers omitted; punctuation and paragraph breaks adjusted. Photographs have separate licences.
