How Kakenya Ntaiya turned pain into progress

There's a saying, talent is everywhere, opportunity is not. And it's true. But every now and then you meet someone with a talent for creating opportunity where it did not previously exist. Kakenya Ntaya was born to be a wife and mother. She wanted to be a teacher. As a girl, she underwent the traditional Maasai cultural practice of female genital cutting or mutilation. It seemed like the rest of her story was already written. She decided to write her own. She negotiated with her father to stay in school. She elbowed her way into a scholarship for college in the United States. And then she did something really remarkable. She went back home. and became a force for changing the very cultural practices that she was born into. Dr. Kakenya Ntaya wanted to change the world. She has done so by rooting her work in her own community, by changing one girl's life at a time, by opening doors of opportunity. Along the way, she's learned a lot about what local leadership really means, how to navigate complex community politics, how to navigate the possibly even more complex politics of philanthropic and donor funding, and the tension between embracing one's culture and changing it. Her story is complex and fascinating. It's also in a way deceptively simple. She's just looking for ways to help. Here's Kakenya Entaya. Kakenya Entaya, thank you so much for joining me. Welcome to the podcast.

Thank you for having me.

You have an incredible story. And I think in order to dig in to the substance and content of this conversation that we're about to have, it's important to rehash a bit of that story. I know you've told it a lot of times, but so much of your own life is intertwined now with your professional mission and As a way into that, I wonder if you could just tell me a little bit about the community that you grew up in. What was it like? What was the community like where you grew up?

So I grew up in, I would say, southwestern Kenya, just below Kisumu and beyond the Maasai Mara. The community, the majority of the people who live in the community, they are Maasai, so I'm a Maasai. And we are very well known because we are dressed in red and lots of beads and we love cows and we are warriors. And there's lots of beauty when it comes to our community. We are still, as communities have changed, cultures have changed, we are still holding on to most of our cultures. Um, and yeah, so, you know, it's a typical, you know, we, we were nomads in the beginning before the government instituted that everybody should own land. So we grazed our cows everywhere and moved along the, you know, different places in search for pasture. And yeah, so that was, uh, beautiful. We were interacting with the environment and land and, uh, yeah but we evolved over time and yeah

and was that your family's livelihood um livestock and and agriculture

Yeah, so my family, pretty much livestock like any other Maasai family. Along the way, we were integrated to the other communities that did farming. And so they started coming into our lands and they taught us how to do, you know, plant maize and vegetables and those kind of things. But our main, main way of living was just cows because everything