LTTM (Life Skills Training For Teen Mothers) is a Project Activity of  Odollo Self Help Group, a community based project founded by a nongovernmental organization in 1998.  Our project is community based and part of our local community working towards improving the lives of Teen Mothers and girls in general. Whereas Teen Mothers, vulnerable Girls and Single mothers are everywhere in our county, the pressures of Kisumu County life and particularly Manyatta slum are uniquely compounded.

The broad objective of our project aims to address the problems arising from school dropout due to teen pregnancies, cohabitation, commercial sex, and other health issues through Skill and economic empowerment programs which will create a society of economically productive and responsible-living women population in our society.

 

The background of our project this year spans a decade of vocational training in Tailoring,information Technology, crafts and design within which period we have mentored above 400 successful business women.

 

Considering the poverty levels in the community, and taking into account that many young girls drop out of school due to poverty, learning disability, peer pressures, early pregnancies, lack of school fees, early marriages or a combination of the aforementioned causes, it becomes evident that their lack of the necessary education, life skills and efficient equipping for labor market render them vulnerable to exploitation and financial dependency.

 

Whereas vulnerable and economically dependent Teen Mothers ,single mothers and young widows are everywhere in our country, the pressure of living in Kisumu County and particularly in Manyatta slums has presented us with a unique and compounded challenge.

 

On the other hand, the absence or lack of reliable statistics on the trends of school drop-outs, early marriages, substance abuse coupled with the lack of understanding of those predisposing factors instigating the status quo has made it the more difficult for the local authorities to come up with policy documents to help mitigate the many and varied problems that our young girls, single mothers and young widows undergo.

 

Summarily, different combinations of factors and drivers that border social, economical and political dysfunctions have continued to undermine the gains made on gender platform. Gender movement therefore, needs to be reengineered to cope with the demands and dynamics of modern life and particularly, the enacting of measures that resonate with the lives of the vulnerable women in the slums. That is to say, it is self-evident that time to move from advocacy to Action has dawned....

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