Kenyan women have a tradition of collective care and resistance which predates colonialism and continues today. Early groups like the Luo Saga, Akamba Mwethya, Gikuyu Ngwatio, and manyatta building groups among the Maasai and Samburu protected women and children, defended land, and preserved indigenous knowledge. This collectivism informed groups such as the 1920 Harry Thuku Protest Group, which released political prisoners in 1960; the Mau Mau Women Fighters, such as Field Marshal Muthoni wa Kirima; Umoja Women’s Village, among others.
Kenyan feminists have been on the frontlines of the fight against violence against women and girls (VAWG) in Kenya for over three decades: as individual activists, as civil society actors, and as various grassroots movements, all informed by a long-standing history of solidarity to protect women, girls, and other marginalised groups. Over the last eight years, we have organised under various umbrellas: #TotalShutdownKE, #StopKillingWomen, #StopKillingUs, and the global #EndFemicide movement, among others, culminating in the consolidation of our efforts under the #EndFemicideKE movement: an inclusive, national, feminist movement that brings together feminist activists, human rights defenders, women’s rights lawyers, and organisations dedicated to demanding a safer, more just society for ALL women and girls in Kenya. #EndFemicideKE links past struggles with today’s movement, arguing that women’s safety and dignity are collective responsibilities and emphasising that solidarity is central to overcoming both patriarchy and violence.
The increase in reported femicide cases between 2017 and 2018 marked a turning point for Kenya. With over 71 cases reported in 2017 and high-profile femicide cases like that of Sharon Otieno in 2018, Kenyan feminists made femicide a national issue, not just a private matter. This visibility led to organised activism: diverse groups protested and educated others, culminating in mass demonstrations in January 2024 coordinated by the #EndFemicideKE movement. This movement channelled collective grief into political action to demand change.
The #EndFemicideKE movement’s central argument is that femicide is systemic and consists not just of individual acts but violence perpetuated by societal structures. The movement points out that legal impunity connects patriarchal attitudes to continued femicide. When crimes against women go unpunished, it sends a message that the justice system does not value our lives, reinforcing the cycle of violence. The movement urges society to recognise and challenge these systemic failures. By calling femicide a systemic issue, the movement challenges us to ask what kind of society we want to be.
Classical political philosophy holds that a State's primary role is to protect its people from violence. The #EndFemicideKE movement argues that the Kenyan State has failed to do this for women. When women are targeted because of their gender, they are left out of the group that the State protects and denied the enjoyment of their rights as citizens. The movement calls for ontological security, meaning that every person has the right to feel safe in their own body. By asking the State to declare femicide a national crisis and, more importantly, respond to it as such, we are reminding the government of its duty to protect women's lives and ensure justice. Anything less is a betrayal.
The movement, building on seminal gains in Kenya’s 2010 Constitution, challenges the traditional liberal idea of freedom, in which only governments and political systems are recognised as capable of controlling, limiting or otherwise interfering with a person’s freedom. The movement critiques how under patriarchy, women’s freedom often depends on their choices of dress, movement, or behaviour; conditions that serve as forms of control, as observed by #MyDressMyChoice in 2014. The #The EndFemicideKE movement rejects this.
Conditional freedom is not freedom at all.
It is another form of control.
#EndFemicideKE points out that freedom for women must mean more than safety from violence. True liberty is present only when women can live without constant fear, shaping neither their lives nor movements to avoid harm. The movement asserts that safety underpins real freedom, and the absence of danger is a necessary, not optional, condition for liberty.
This movement shifts responsibility for ending violence. Instead of focusing on keeping women and girls “safe”, it demands an end to violence against them, carried out overwhelmingly by men. Some of the movement’s main messages, “Stop Killing Us” and “Educate Your Sons”, call for our society to take responsibility. "Stop Killing Us" is a direct request for the basic right to live, refusing to soften the message and naming the violence for what it is: deadly acts against women. "Educate Your Sons" addresses root causes by urging society to focus on raising boys and young men to recognise, understand and respect women’s human rights, including our inherent right to dignity, autonomy and freedom from violence. Previously, advice was targeted at girls, but the movement pushes for teaching boys and young men empathy, emotional intelligence, and consent, starting in schools and extending to homes and communities. These practical steps aim to reshape ideas about masculinity and prevent future violence.
This dialectic of safety and freedom is anchored in the concept of bodily integrity and autonomy. The movement asserts that a woman’s body is sovereign territory, not a site for male negotiation or communal honour.
It says a woman’s body belongs solely to her, not to men or her community.
This is why it strongly opposes using Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) or informal courts for VAWG, since these treat women’s safety as something to trade for family or community peace. Taking an intersectional approach, the movement understands that women experience violence differently depending on class, age, and location.
Still, the main message is clear: safety is not negotiable; it is a basic right. The call to end femicide is a demand for a feminist peace; not merely the absence of war, but the presence of a social order where women can live fully as human beings, with their inherent dignity respected and protected. The movement serves as a testament to the fact that when women organise to reclaim their safety, they are, in fact, organising to secure the freedom of the entire nation.
Because of the work of the #EndFemicideKE movement, its members and other women’s rights organisations, the President of Kenya appointed a Technical Working Group on Gender-Based Violence including Femicide (TWG) in January 2025. The mandate of this TWG was to investigate VAWG in Kenya and provide actionable recommendations on violence prevention, investigation, prosecution, and survivor support mechanisms. During 2025, the TWG undertook various initiatives, including issuing a call for written submissions and holding public consultations. It released its report, dated November 2025, in January 2026.
The report adopts a few recommendations championed by the #EndFemicideKE movement and other women’s rights organisations. Unfortunately, apart from these recommendations, the report is impractical, inapplicable, and unrealistic. A thorough review of the document finds that it is yet another way for the Government of Kenya to pay lip service to its mandate of preventing and addressing violence against women and girls.
The report subscribes to a fantastical understanding of Kenya as a country, and a society. It displays a surface-level, simplistic understanding of gender-based violence (GBV), which in Kenya overwhelmingly manifests as violence against women and girls (VAWG). It displays deliberate ignorance of the workings, or lack thereof, of the Kenyan State. Most of its recommendations are not rooted in evidence. Consequently, not only are its recommendations unlikely to be implemented, but even if they were, they would neither prevent nor address violence against women and girls in Kenya.
This analysis examines these problematic aspects of the report from the perspective of Kenyan women and girls.