When culture clashes with class: The fight to keep Baringo girls in school

In the hills and scorched plains of Baringo County in Kenya, where homesteads sit miles apart and cattle bells cut through the dry air, childhood can disappear quietly, sometimes before it has fully begun.

For many girls here, school is not a guarantee. It is a fragile promise, constantly threatened by traditions older than the classrooms meant to protect them. Marriage, not homework, waits at the door. And for some, that door opens before they can even spell their own names.

Karen Chemwok remembers asking for one thing: To go to school.

"I told my mother to take me to school," she says softly, amid sobs, "but she ran away from home."

Karen was five years old. Her story is not an exception in parts of Baringo. It is a pattern.

A Childhood Traded

Dorothy Jebet still remembers the photograph that broke her heart. In it, a small girl sat beside her mother-in-law, seated on a dusty ground, eyes vacant. The child was Chemwok.

"She was only five." Jebet says. "She didn't even know what was happening. She didn't know she had been married off, and she was now a wife."

Jebet, a journalist-turned-activist, founded the Elimu Kwanza Initiative in 2019, after years of watching girls vanish from classrooms and reappear as wives. According to a 2017 UNICEF study, nearly two-thirds of girls of Pokot origin were married before the age of 18. 

In these communities' marriage is not simply cultural, it is economic. Girls are exchanged for cows or goats. Female genital mutilation (FGM) becomes the gateway; the ritual that declares a child "ready."

"FGM gives child marriage validity," Jebet explains. "You grow overnight. You become a woman. Then you are married off."

A girl who has undergone FGM can fetch up to around 100 cows and 40 goats.

Rescues at Gunpoint

Stopping that exchange can be dangerous.

Cheptanu Walasiwa, a community leader and survivor herself, remembers the day she went to rescue Karen.

"That girl was married off," she says. "When I got the news, I went and took her to Top View school."

The resistance was immediate, and armed.

"Her father pointed his gun at me and said, 'I will shoot you!' " Walasiwa recalls. "I told him, shoot! Then you'll find out what's next."

It was only when retired Colonel Moses Kwonyike, feared and respected in equal measure, arrived that the threat dissolved.

Kwonyike, a former military officer, has become an unlikely shield for rescued girls. His presence can calm volatile confrontations in a region plagued by banditry, cattle rustling, and chronic insecurity.

"I remember that the father of Chemwok threatened me, but I was firm with him that I was going to put him in. He thought he was going to scare me, but I was firm with him. And then I told him I am going to fix you, and I'm calling the police right now. Actually, he took off. He went out of that area for three days." Kwonyike said.

"I found this girl was, I think, a seven-year-old kid," he recalls of another rescue. "So I got enraged and told them over my dead body!"

In Baringo, law enforcement struggles to reach remote villages. Homes are separated by kilometers. Armed conflict over livestock is also common. In such terrain, rescuing a girl can at times cost someone their life.

"This place is a jungle," Jebet says. "It's very hard to come here and arrest someone. It could even make you lose your life."

Marked for Marriage

Often, the girls are easy to identify.

Those booked for marriage wear 'supto' : A heavy clay hairstyle molded onto their heads, hardened like stone. It can stay for months, a visible marker of a future already decided.

Karen wore it. 

Her childhood was further fractured by poverty and neglect. Her father drank heavily. Her mother fled with Karen's twin, leaving her behind.

And yet, when she speaks now, Karen's voice holds a startling clarity.

"I want to help my parents, my siblings," she says. "And get money to go look for my mother."

So were many other girls married off and rescued.

Blessings Jepterit remembers exactly why she studies so hard now.

"When I am in class or outside, I work very hard," she says. "Because I remember where I come from and keep in mind that people there have not changed their mindset till now."

Blessings was rescued from Chemolingot in Tiaty Sub-county, Baringo County, an epicenter of child marriage. Returning home was never an option.

"If we go back home, they will stop us from coming back to school.”

Since arriving at Top View Academy, she has not had contact with her nuclear family. She lives with relatives, holding onto education as both refuge and rebellion.

Top View: A safe line between past and future

For many rescued girls, Top View Academy became the difference between survival and return.

When Cheptanu first brought girls there, the school struggled to absorb them.

"They said there were too many children and they needed money," she recalls. "Some stayed. Others had to go back home unless they got sponsors."

Those who remained found stability for the first time. At Top View, trauma meets structure and silence meets routine.

Deputy Headteacher Monica Toroitich has watched girls arrive broken and slowly rebuild.

"There is this girl called Valerie, she had been raped. She was rescued and brought here. Right now, she is in high school."

Another girl, Felistus, was pulled from an early marriage. She is now in form two at one of the top national schools in Kenya.

"When they arrive, the school administration plans with the teachers so we have to do guidance and counselling for them. "Toroitich says.

But capacity is limited, funding is fragile, and every rescued girl represents dozens more left behind.

The Weight of Silence

Government officials acknowledge the problem, but quietly.

"The political will amongst the FGM-practicing communities is very low," says Juma Khwateng'e, Director at the State Department for Gender in Baringo County. "Because you talk against FGM then you will not be elected to parliament or to any position whatsoever. So, it is silent. They are very silent. They tell us in the offices, please do it, but for them they don't pronounce it very well. So, there is no fight at all."

Behind closed doors, they encourage activists. In public, they hesitate.

Meanwhile, girls continue to disappear.

In Tiaty Sub-county, what Jebet calls the "ground zero" of child marriage, patriarchy governs daily life. Men decide and girls obey.

"As a woman in this community, you are part of the furniture, to say the least." Jebet says. "You are there to be seen, not heard."

Survivors who stayed to fight

Cheptanu Walasiwa knows this reality intimately.

At 15, she was married off as a sixth wife to an elderly man. When she resisted, she was beaten, tied to trees and dragged back when she fled. She survived on a cup of porridge a day and water was scarce. Soap was nonexistent.

She endured and eventually escaped with her seven children.

"I would chop firewood. If I earned a few shillings, we ate."

Today, she rescues girls from the very fate she survived. Some return home only under threat of arrest while others never go back at all.

Fragile Progress

There are signs of movement.

"I lobbied for a bill in the county assembly of Baringo to have a legal framework and policies that guide and serve those survivors of sexual violence or gender-based violence. For girls to be married off, that is violence. Imagine a girl who is being pulled from the house because she is crying, and then her husband is waiting outside, and she is carried on the back. That is gender violence," Jebet says.

The bill was passed in 2022 and is now an act in Baringo County, aimed at protecting survivors of sexual and gender-based violence. Kenya has pledged to end child marriage by 2030 in line with target 5.3 of the Sustainable Development Goals.

However, implementation lags.

"I believe there is no political will to implement this Act. So, it is just lying there gathering dust." Jebet says. "Women's issues are not a priority. Girl issues are not a priority. If we could get help from whatever source, we could implement it as Elimu Kwanza because it is our baby. It is we who pushed for this bill until it passed."

Khwatenge says some progress has been made.

"We have what we call the Second Chance program within our ministry, within Baringo County. We take the children who have dropped out of school and have been impregnated. We take them back to school, in day schools. They complete school. Like last year, one of them got a B+. So, we feel that that is an impact. Life has changed for that girl forever."

Still, the need far outweighs the help.

Cheptanu believes she could take more than 200 girls to school, if sponsors stepped forward.

A Question of Choice

In Baringo, culture and class collide daily. Education threatens an economy built on livestock and tradition and poverty fuels choices that rob girls of their futures.

Yet, change, however slow, feels possible.

"The best way out is education," Kwonyike says. "Coupled with healthcare."

"Keep your children in school," Walasiwa urges parents. "God will create a way."

And perhaps that way begins by seeing daughters not as currency, but as children.

"Let the girls go to school. Don't look at your daughter as a source of improving your status in the community, Jebet says.  "If they'll start viewing their daughters from that perspective as human beings first, not things that can be exchanged for livestock. I think we'll start having another phase of hope that we are actually heading in the right direction."

For Chemwok and Jepterit, the fight has already rewritten their story. For many others still hidden beyond the hills, it has not yet begun.