Giving Compass' Take:

• Writing for News Deeply, Naipanoi Lepapa explains why the residents of a Kenyan village are protesting the loss of their land to the government. According to Lepapa, these residents were guaranteed payment for the loss of their lands to a new railway line, but were never given compensation. 

• How will this protest encourage the Kenyan government to compensate those who lost their land and jobs? How can land rights in general spread more gender equity around the world?

• Read about these Kenyan women working together to make change and start a business.

For most of her life, Mary Mwihaki lived on the same piece of land in Kangawa village, keeping cattle and goats and making $70 a month selling fruits and vegetables to her neighbors. Today, she is being forced from her land, left with no animals and no way to make money. So she spends her days sitting in a blue plastic chair on a construction site parking lot, protesting against the new railway that she says took everything from her.“I am jobless now,” Mwihaki, 60, says. “I don’t have any education and I can’t find any work because I am old. I don’t have money or food.”

Since July 29, Mwihaki and 25 other women have been staging a sit-in protest at one of the construction sites for the new Standard Gauge Railway (SGR). Every day, from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m., they gather at the site, trying to block the work being done by the contractor, the China Road and Bridge Corporation (CRBC). The men in their communities join them at night. The protesters say they are still waiting for the compensation they were promised in 2016, when the government bought their land to make way for the railway.

Mwihaki was told she would receive more than 30 million Kenyan shillings ($297,800) when the National Land Commission (NLC) bought her land in Kangawa village, 19.2 miles (30.9km) southeast of Nairobi, so it could be turned into the Ngong railway station, part of a 75-mile (120km) line being built between Nairobi and Naivasha. She says so far she has received only 250,000 shillings ($2,480).

The project has displaced more than 1,000 residents of Kajiado County. A mother of seven, Mwihaki has refused to move and is currently sharing a plot of land with the railway station. She says she has nowhere else to go and is struggling to make ends meet. Eight months ago, she had to sell her eight cows and 10 goats at a loss.

Read the full article about Kenyan women farmers by Naipanoi Lepapa at News Deeply.