Prudence Mutiso News Today

Kenya — In this country of widespread poverty, one of the most lucrative businesses is also one of the most heartbreaking : baby trafficking. (...)

Read an op-ed in Nation by the Center's Prudence Mutiso, Martin Onyango, and Timothy Thondu.

The Constitution views a woman in need of safe abortion services as a patient. As such, doctor-patient confidentiality rule applies.

Kenyan High Court rules that safe abortion care is a fundamental right in a landmark verdict today that protects patients and healthcare providers from arbitrary arrests and prosecution.

BBC News By Joel Gunter image captionAdama has returned to live in her village. "Life has been so hard," she said. Last month, BBC Africa Eye exposed a thriving black-market trade in babies in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi. Police arrested seven people on trafficking charges in response to the story, but what about the women on the other side of these illegal deals? What drives a mother to sell her child? Adamas life was easy when she had her parents, she said. Money was tight, and her options we...

Adama arrived in Nairobi and began by selling watermelon on the street, but it didn’t pay enough and her housemate stole any money she left at home. Life in the city was hard, too. She has a scar at the top of her forehead, just under her cropped hair, from defending herself. “Some men were playing with me and it reached a point I had to fight back,” she said. She moved on to work on a construction site, where she wasn’t paid at all, and from there to a nightclub, where she instructed h...

Adama’s life was easy when she had her parents, she said. Money was tight, and her options were already narrow, but there was an order to things that made sense. She attended school and cherished it. She had few worries. But then her father died when she was 12, and her mother a few years later. As the eldest of three, Adama had a duty to provide for her two siblings. “Life became so hard then,” she said, in a conversation from her village in a rural part of western Kenya. “I had to dro...