Foundation for Pastoralist Women

BACKGROUND

Foundation for Pastoralists Women (FPW) is a Non-Governmental organization voicing and articulating Pastoralist women’s issues in the Horn and Eastern Africa.  FPW is an initiative of Pastoralist women from diverse professional backgrounds who saw the need to have a platform that amplifies the voices of pastoralist women for effective lobby and advocacy for pastoralist women’s inclusion and participation in their own development.

FPW works across the East and Horm of Africa is due to the fact that pastoralists communities live along the borders and their way of life is search for pasture all year round as such pastoralist communities freely move across the borders without much restriction.
Due to this reality and inter related resource based conflict arising from it, FPW has found itself out of necessity expanding its scope to cover 11 Larger Arid and Semi Arid Land (ASAL) in Kenya, Somalia, Somaliland, Tanzania, Uganda and Ethiopia.

In all these regions with an exception of Uganda, 80% of Land in these countries are pastoral land .In addition, majority of active users of this vast land are women. Despite this physical investment, women continue to be excluded from Social, Economic and Political benefits associated with the land.

Further national governments have also not prioritized the issues of pastoral communities; this means that for pastoralist women the situation is much worse as they continue to fall further down the development ladder. It is with these in mind that FPW has specifically aligned its mandate around issues of pastoralist women and circumstances as regards to livelihood, environment and climate change, governance, education, health, peace building and conflict mitigation, and general sociological aspects.