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Continue reading →: The Woman I Am Becoming
Sometimes, it takes a question from a stranger to make you see your own story clearly. Recently, I was asked how I came to live in Europe. Was there a plan? Family waiting? My answer was that I’d simply decided to leave Kenya to see what life held which felt…
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Continue reading →: The Illegal Charcoal Trap: Why Kenya’s Clean Cooking Campaign is Losing to a Black Market
Introduction Walk through any major market in Kenya from big marjets in Nairobi to small rural markets and you’ll find it openly displayed: sacks of black gold. Charcoal. The very commodity that KFS (Kenya Forest Service) and NEMA (National Environment Management Authority) have been fighting to eliminate for years due…
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Continue reading →: The Unseen War: How Climate Scarcity Fuels Conflict in Africa
Introduction I remember as a child when the rains did not come. The plains grew silent as wildlife and even birds migrated. The wind grew strong, whipping up dust that swirled like phantom tornadoes. The ground became bare, and the rivers dried up to cracked clay. My family owned livestock, and I…
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Continue reading →: The Inheritance of Silence: A Story for Umuofia, Maasailand, and the World
There is a silence that is taught, not born. It is learned by a young girl in a Maasai manyatta when she sees her mother’s posture change; the straight back that carried a heavy water pot now softening into a deferential curve as her father approaches. It is a silence…
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Continue reading →: Beyond the Paradox: Rural Women as Architects of Climate Resilience
Introduction For generations, the women in my community have been the unseen web holding our society together the cornerstone of our families and local economies. Yet, their voices have been a whisper, their labor a backdrop to a story they didn’t author. Unseen, unheard, and unrepresented, they have fought for…
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Continue reading →: The Silent Killer in Our Kitchens: Why Clean Cooking is Central to Africa’s Future
Introduction Growing up, I always knew that smoke from cooking fires was dangerous. It stung my eyes, filled my lungs, and caused coughing fits. I heard tragic stories of suffocation and accidents with paraffin or charcoal stoves. What I didn’t know was that this same, familiar smoke contributes to climate…
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Continue reading →: The Forge in the Margins: Where Women Build the Future
This is the stark reality for countless women across Africa, a story I know intimately because it is the story of my community. Pressed to the margins of formal financial, political, and infrastructural systems by a potent mix of patriarchy, poverty, and lack of access, they are told their world…
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Continue reading →: The Power of Yearning: Transforming Dreams into Reality
Have you ever felt a yearning so deep it becomes a part of you? It’s more than a thought. It’s something you breathe in and out. You feel it on your skin like a change in the weather. You see it everywhere; in a stranger’s smile, on a billboard, in…
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Continue reading →: Being my biggest Project
There are moments when giving up whispers as the easier option. But for some of us, that option was never on the map. The terrain of our dreams doesn’t have an exit route. The biggest risk I ever took was moving from Kenya to Europe. I grew up envisioning a…
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Continue reading →: Carrying the Future on Her Back
Before the first light spills across the savannah, a Maasai woman rises. She moves quietly, purposefully the invisible web that holds her world together. In this, she is not alone; she is the heartbeat of countless homes across Africa. When the woman stirs, the household stirs. If the fire is…
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Continue reading →: Becoming My Own Home
Growing up in rural Kenya, I lived in a county where the land stretched endlessly. You couldn’t see its beginning or its end only rolling plains, acacia trees silhouetted against the vast sky, rivers, and grass. Nature echoed around us: birds chirped, cowbells rang from the distance, smoke curled from homesteads,…
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Continue reading →: The Girl Who Packed Her Mother’s Prayers
When I left home, I carried no heirlooms, no land, no riches. What I packed instead were my mother’s whispered prayers unseen, weightless, yet heavy enough to shape the woman I am becoming. My mother is the eldest of twenty children. My grandfather, like many Maasai men of his time,…
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Continue reading →: Permission to Outgrow
To outgrow your world is to break its heart and your own, a little. It is never simple. It is freedom and complexity tangled together a delicate rebellion against the soil that shaped your roots. For me, it meant breaking away from certain Maasai customs, especially those that bound women…
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Continue reading →: The Currency of Courage: Paying the Price for Reinvention
From a young age, I sensed I was meant for a bigger life one that didn’t fit the script handed to me. Growing up as my mother’s youngest child in a vast Maasai village, I had no siblings to play with. Our isolation was no accident; it was the legacy…
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Continue reading →: Walking Between Worlds: A Maasai Woman in Europe
I grew up in a world rooted deeply in tradition where values weren’t just taught, they were lived. In my small corner of rural Kenya, my mother was the anchor of our home. In the Maasai community, it is the mother who raises the children teaches them, molds them, prays…
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Continue reading →: Blooming in Foreign SoilI grew up in a small Maasai village in Kenya, where life was marked by dusty roads, outdoor play, and the quiet strength of women. My earliest memories are of playing alone in the open fields, or when luck was on my side, with my cousins or neighbors’ children. I…
Hello,
I am Nelly
A Maasai woman, advocate, and unrelenting voice for equity, gender justice, and sustainable energy access in marginalized communities.
This blog is my testament to the fight against systemic barriers: a space where data meets lived experience, and policy collides with the realities of those left in the dark.
As one of the few women in my community to break free from restrictive traditions, I channel my journey into actionable insights to bridging the gap between grassroots struggles and global solutions.
Here, you’ll find:
- Critical analysis on energy poverty’s gendered dimensions.
- Community-driven strategies to uplift women and girls.
- Unflinching advocacy to hold power structures accountable.
This is not just a blog. It’s a blueprint for change that demands not just access, but agency.
Join me. Listen. Amplify.
The Blooming Maasai 