Religious leaders: The heroes of family planning for Kisumu's Nubian community

It is noon, and a group of children are scrambling to share the shade of a tree as the hot sun induces a cascade of sweat across their faces at the Nubian IDP camp in Kibos, Kisumu City.

A few meters from where they sit, a group of women listen keenly as they chat with their Imam and a community health promoter who had visited them.

Here, up to 170 families are sharing small tents after they were displaced in 2021 after government bulldozers flattened their homes that were located next to Kibos Railway station about two kilometres away.

Despite the small size of the tents, families of even eight people share the small tents while the privileged few have constructed their own houses made of iron sheets.

For one visiting the place for the first time, it is baffling how the families fit in the small space where parental privacy is manifestly impossible.

A few meters from where the tents are erected, a recently built mosque stands tall and is the epitome of spiritual and medical hope for the population.

The Imam reads the Quran and shares some light teachings with the women on establishing sustainable families by embracing family planning.

The encounter lasts about 30 minutes before the women depart to prepare lunch for their families while others scatter to run different errands within the camp.

The community is among those who have not embraced family planning, which they attribute to their culture and religious beliefs. Consequently, the situation has made life difficult for some families, who cannot effectively fend for their children due to limited resources.

However, religious leaders' intervention is slowly changing lives at the IDP camp. The intervention is part of the USAID Boresha Jamii project, implemented by the Jaramogi Oginga Odinga University of Science and Technology and the Kisumu County Government.

The project started in 2021 promotes dialogue to change community members’ perceptions of family planning and sexual and reproductive health, and it is slowly bearing fruit as more families embrace modern family planning methods.

According to Dr Solomon Orero, USAID’s Chief of the party, the intervention is part of an effort to ensure that families embrace spacing between births to help create sustainable families.

“The goal of the family planning intervention was aimed at encouraging the Nubian community to embrace birth spacing and adopt a system that allows infants to grow well and mothers to heal,” he explains.

Khalifa Hamisi, a religious leader at the IDP camp, explains that they have embraced dialogue to encourage families to adopt modern family planning methods to establish sustainable families.

He explained that the community had been slow to adopt family planning, making life difficult for several families at the camp.

“Since we started engaging families on family planning, cases of teenagers getting pregnant at the camp have reduced while more families are also supporting the establishment of smaller families,” he says.

At the camp, we meet Leila Mohamed, a mother of four preparing a meal for her family. She says she is among the women who have embraced family planning after several years of doubt.

ALSO READ: Nubians pay for the sins of their grandfathers 100 years later

She says the short dialogue sessions have been instrumental in helping them change their perceptions about interventions such as family planning.

“Our religious leaders played a key role in advising us on establishing sustainable families. I understand why it is important to embrace family planning,” she says.

Leila’s husband, Abdul Latiff, says that the community has slowly adopted family planning thanks to the timely intervention by the religious leaders and the CHPs. “We have received important knowledge about family planning from our religious leaders. We have embraced family planning,” he says.

Hudheifa Yasin, the Imam of the mosque at the camp, describes the dialogue sessions as a breakthrough in promoting sustainable families.

He admits that the Nubian community has always relied only on religious ways of family planning, but most families have been reluctant to embrace medical methods.

“Families are now able to plan their lives better. We have to continue encouraging families to embrace family planning methods. But we are still optimistic that more people will change their perceptions about family planning, but we are on the right track,” he says.

Within the community, families claim they have been shying away from family planning methods available in health facilities because males run most facilities.

“Our faith does not allow a woman to be naked before a man who is not her husband. Some of the methods require women to undress before the family planning method is injected. It is one of the reasons why the Nubian community has been slow to embrace it,” says a mother of five who asked not to be named.

She also noted that the same issue also affects them whenever they are invited to go for cervical cancer screening. “We cannot go for such screenings unless the doctor available is a female,” she says.

Pauline Owino, a community health promoter (CHP), said the Boresha Jamii project helped them intensify dialogue with the communities on sexual and reproductive health.

“We have had a lot of dialogue with the families, and we have changed perceptions about family planning. We trained religious leaders also to help us pass the information,” she says.

ALSO READ: The Nubian curse: Why we still feel like foreigners

She is among the champions trained through the USAID Boresha Jamii project implemented by JOOUST.

Dorcas Ogutu, the sub-county community health services focal person for Kisumu East, says that the intervention by the religious leaders has helped improve demand for family planning.

For instance, when the camp was first established in 2021, only four families had embraced family planning. However, 36 families had embraced family planning at the beginning of November 2024.

Jane Kachiki, another CHP in charge of 10 households and more women at the camp, has been inquiring about the best modern family planning options.

A 42-year-old father of five told The Standard that he had opted to go for a vasectomy. He believes family planning is crucial in helping families better care for themselves.

“I did not believe in family planning, but religious leaders have managed to convince me of the need to embrace it,” he says.

According to the Kenya Democratic Health Survey Report, 2022, the country's total demand for family planning increased between 2003 to 2022 from 32 per cent to 57 per cent. Over the same period, unmet needs declined from 35 per cent to 14 per cent.

Nationally, 63 per cent of Kenyans use family planning, of which 57 per cent use modern methods and six per cent use traditional methods.

Among modern family planning methods adopted by Kenyans include Injectables at 20 per cent, implants (19 per cent), pills (eight per cent), and Injectable Drug Users (IDU) at four per cent.

In Kisumu, the percentage of women who have embraced modern family planning methods stands at 57 per cent while the total demand stands at 76.9 per cent.

Experts believe the use of dialogue will help bolster the number of families embracing modern methods.

However, the intervention by the religious leaders is still grappling with the deep cultural beliefs among the Nubian families and the religious practices that embrace polygamy.

They have to strike a balance between promoting religious doctrines while at the same time advancing the need to embrace spaced births.