Lucy Njenga: From the slums to global ambassador
Lucy Wanjiku Njenga, the executive director of Positive Young Women Voices (PYWV) and a global voice in the triple threat campaign.
What you need to know:
- Having grown up in Dandora, an informal settlement in Kenya, she was particularly vulnerable.
- She was sexually abused at only eight years old, and just after completing high school in 2010, she got pregnant.
As Kenya grapples with the triple threat of HIV infection, teenage pregnancies and gender-based violence, survivors are forging their own solutions to address the emerging trend.
Lucy Wanjiku Njenga, the executive director of Positive Young Women Voices (PYWV) and a global voice in the triple threat campaign, bears the scars of the threats. Having grown up in Dandora, an informal settlement in Kenya, she was particularly vulnerable. She was sexually abused at only eight years old, and just after completing high school in 2010, she got pregnant.
“I felt a lot of shame when I got pregnant at 19. Everybody could see that I was not the ‘good’ girl that I was purporting to be. I would reflect on my choices and hate myself for making them,” Lucy opened up during the launch of Billi Now Now! in Nairobi.
Soon after her parents found out she was pregnant, they asked her to move in with the father of her baby even though both of them did not have a source of income.
“That was when I began feeling isolated. It was hard. People expected me to fail in life and my family lost hope in me. I would have probably managed the teenage pregnancy better if I had proper support.”
Hope Made a Way
In her book, Hope Made a Way, Lucy details how she found out that she was HIV positive during a free medical camp in 2012. Because of the immense poverty that she was living in, she could not even afford Sh20 clinic visits, so she did not know about her status earlier.
"I had a difficult pregnancy where I would constantly vomit and my three-month-old would cough a lot. My partner and I could not get to the bottom of it until when I was diagnosed. I finally understood why he was constantly sick.”
The baby died when he was only seven months old. Lucy says that after her death, she felt lost and could not even confide in her partner because he was physically abusive.
It was shortly after this that she started to reclaim her life. She left her abusive partner and started taking her HIV medication while doing odd jobs, including sales and marketing, and volunteering with a local community-based organisation as a trainer.
Her breakthrough came in 2017 when she and her friends started PYWV. “I realised that my life was a blueprint that I could use to inspire other young women living in informal settlements to avoid the mistakes I made. This was to be the other side of the coin of my life. I am reclaiming what I lost by sharing my story with other teenage mothers who might be going through the same,” she says.
PYWV donates sanitary towels to 300 girls in community schools every year through crowdfunding. Although they started small, they have grown to a point where they have set up a scholarship fund for young women and girls.
They also offer training in prevention and elimination of violence by mentoring 250 young men and girls in a year. Since their inception in 2017, Lucy says they have worked with about 5,000 women and girls.
“The reason why we conduct outreaches and dialogue is because when I was growing up, my parents did not talk about safe sex. I was exposed to a lot of misinformation about contraceptives and did not understand the full extent of gender-based violence which made me more vulnerable to the triple threat,” she says.
Today, Lucy is a highly sought-after global ambassador, having served on the UNAIDS Global Board and the Global Fund Country Coordinating Mechanisms. She carries the banner of the triple threat agenda.
