Designing and Delivering Government-Led Graduation Programs for People in Extreme Poverty

This fund enabled BOMA to continue to scale its work in its determination to reach one million women and children across the arid lands of Africa.

By 2017, BOMA had expanded to five counties with two hundred employees across northern Kenya, had opened a partnership in Uganda and secured funding for expansion to Ethiopia. Kathleen was also working closely with the World Bank and the Government of Kenya who wanted to adopt BOMA’s poverty graduation model as part of their social protection strategies for arid land communities.

With numerous studies and evidence of measurable impact at hand, in 2014 BOMA committed to scaling their program to reach one million women and children through strategic partnerships with other NGO’s and government adoption. This required advancing BOMA’s visibility in the NGO sector that gained traction when Kathleen was awarded a Rainer Fellowship through the Mulago Foundation, and through BOMA’s numerous other awards including a Lighthouse Award from the UN Climate Change Conference and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

For centuries, communities in the Arid and Semi Arid Lands (ASALs) of Kenya have tended livestock and lived off the land but all that was being changed by accelerated climate change. Over the next two years Kathleen traveled widely through Northern Kenya with Kura Omar, a Lekuton aide who grew up there. Traveling in a beat-up Land Rover, she and Kura drove from village to village across the arid scrubland, accompanied by one support staff person and a security guard. With Kura as guide and translator, she spent those two years listening—to village elders, faith leaders, community development workers and residents. But it was the conversations with the women who brought home how devastating the droughts were for families. While the men traveled farther and longer in search of grazing terrain and water, the women and children were left in the villages to survive on their own, often for as long as six months. With little hope of employment beyond menial labor, like hauling water or gathering firewood, they are forced to beg for credit and rely on humanitarian food aid to survive. The women spoke passionately about their dreams: to be empowered, to create their own solutions, to lead their families out of extreme poverty. Kathleen and Kura decided to build an organization that focused on helping women earn an income as it offered the most promising path for building the resilience of families in the arid and semi-arid lands. Kura became BOMA’s co-founder and first employee.