On a warm day, Amina Farah was driving to the museum for an event. She describes feeling cute in a lime coloured linen suit. That was right before something other-worldly came over her body, something she’d never felt before, or since, to that scale. Even the car’s AC couldn’t help.
“From the top of my head to my feet, I just felt this heat just travel right through me,” she says.
Today, Ms Farah is a menopause advocate, coach and speaker, spreading the gospel of the inevitable changes women’s bodies will go through. Hers is a campaign of menopause knowledge and awareness to equip women with information on a life-stage which was not available to her when she first started showing signs, which at the time she could only relate to career exhaustion.
Menopause advocate, coach and speaker Amina Farah during an interview in Nairobi on November 11, 2025.
Photo credit: Bonface Bogita | Nation Media Group
Around the age of 38, Ms Farah visited fertility specialists while in the US and later doctors of repute in Kenya, but none of them ever mentioned menopause.
“In a way, menopause has been [treated as] a footnote in medical education,” she says. “When I came to understand the history and when I talk about menopause, I want women to understand that we were not even used in clinical studies and research until 1993. Did you know that?” she poses.
Born in Kenya, Ms Farah moved to the US for studies, later working as a lawyer before making the decision to move back home to pursue business interests. She’d always exercised and kept fit, but with three restaurants keeping her busy, she cut down on her hot yoga classes. Pretty soon, she started to experience bouts of anxiety and extreme lethargy, which she attributed to the jitters of a new business owner. She experienced mood swings and bouts of rage as well as unusual cravings, which weren’t characteristic of her. She again attributed this to entrepreneurial pressures.
“I started gaining weight, and not just weight specifically [but] around my belly,” she recalls. “This kind of change in my body was very unexpected.”
A friend later told her she’d thought she was ‘eating her feelings.’ She even started withdrawing socially and started using a glass of wine, or four to ‘de-stress.’
As the Covid-19 pandemic hit and her restaurants and all others shut down, to breathe, Ms Farah started taking walks in Karura forest and, like many others at the time, turned to podcasts. That’s where she came across an episode where a Dr Barbara Taylor was speaking on oestrogen therapy and menopause. She stopped in her tracks. All the dots connected, the dry skin and hair, the weight gain, the mood swings, the lethargy, all of it started to crystallise.
Menopause advocate, coach and speaker Amina Farah during an interview in Nairobi on November 11, 2025.
Photo credit: Bonface Bogita | Nation Media Group
The hot flash all those years back in Washington DC which saw her rush to the washroom to use the air-dryer and stuff tissues under her armpits to avoid ruining her ‘cute’ lime linen suit all made sense.
To Ms Farah, though, hot flashes are the ‘celebrity’ of menopause; it’s what is shown on television and talked about. She however says every woman’s experience is unique and luckily, hot flashes weren’t prevalent in her journey.
She booked a call with Dr Taylor and got plenty of information as the first steps to her journey of teaching herself what she’d been so ignorant to started. “I read through and I [was asking] why do women not know this?” she wondered.
She further contemplated why a transition that all women will go through, one none can negotiate their way out of, was such a mystery. She watched videos of Halle Berry, the Hollywood actor, talking about being misdiagnosed with herpes while she was in her perimenopause phase and was shocked.
That no doctor prior had ever mentioned the word menopause led Ms Farah on a journey to understand why. She thinks it is a stigma. If one is menopausal, they’re getting towards a proverbial expiry date. “It’s not just a word, it’s an experience,” Ms Farah says. Today, she has a menopause awareness platform, Fab-u-las Living, where she takes away any shame while talking about the inevitable.
In 2022, Ms Farah decided to speak out on menopause, starting the conversation in a closed Facebook group she called Menopause chats. Here, she realised, especially from women who were in perimenopause, the precursor to menopause, that some were in denial.
“I would get these comments, ‘Is there a way you could use another word?’ I [said], why am I using another word? It's menopause. We’re all going to go through it!” she asserts.
She figures the shame could somehow be linked to the loss of fertility, a highly regarded attribute, especially in an African context.
“We’ve been spun this tale of anti-ageing. I can’t anti-age. We all age every day,” she adds. She prefers the term healthy ageing.
Along the way, Ms Farah has initiated the FAB-U-LUS AT ANY AGE campaign, telling the menopause stories of women between the ages of 45 to 60 as well as urging women to look at their family history. Studies show that women will experience menopause with similar traits to those their mothers went through.
Menopause advocate, coach and speaker Amina Farah during an interview in Nairobi on November 11, 2025.
Photo credit: Bonface Bogita | Nation Media Group
Her platform also lists 54 (and growing) signs that a woman may be going through this stage of her life. It’s interesting to note that women of colour, on average, hit menopause at 49, two years earlier than their Caucasian counterparts, with the manifestations in the former being more pronounced.
Asked about the ideal situation she would like to see about menopause awareness, Ms Farah speaks to continuous education for health practitioners.
“I would like to see a situation where menopause care is included for women over 40 in the hospitals in Kenya and doctors are aware,” she says.
According to Ms Farah, knowledge on menopause should not just be taught to obstetric and gynaecological professionals but to general practitioners as well. She points to the United Kingdom’s National Health Service (NHS) as the benchmark.
On menopausal health, Ms Farah defends her passion. “I want people to be this fascinated about it. About 51 per cent of the population of the world is women. If you live long enough, you're going to go through menopause. It's a non-negotiable. So, we need this information.”
Women hitting perimenopause and menopause are at the peak of their experience and value with regards to their contribution in the workplace, Ms Farah observes.
She, however, refers to a study done in the UK, whose findings suggested that women experiencing signs of menopause are more likely to retire early, given the pressures of this phase of their lives.
Ms Farah says menopausal women may be reluctant to share this at the workplace. For instance, insomnia may be one of the manifestations of menopause.
“Some women are afraid, they're worried that [by] sharing they're going through menopause will impact their work. They’re worried [about] ageism where they may be replaced by younger ‘talent,’” she says.
“I think workplaces could be a bit more supportive of women because this is your talent. This is your experience. This is the value they're bringing,” she says, speaking to the female workforce’s tendency to nurture while putting their own well-being on the back burner.
Since 2022, Ms Farah has spoken to the need for flexi-time for women battling through adverse menopausal symptoms.
“Let's add this (menopause awareness) to policy, to understand these are dynamics that are real. We've accepted mental health as a real thing that can affect employees, and we're doing things to make it available.”
According to Ms Farah, companies should have a ‘chill-room’ to accommodate not only women going through menopause, but also for anyone who needs to step away from the pressures of their cubicle.
