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In the past two weeks, public attention in Kenya has been seized by two different but deeply connected stories about power, impunity, and the cost paid by women and girls.
Globally, renewed attention to the Epstein files has revived an old question: how can sexual exploitation persist for years in societies that claim to have “strong institutions,” and how can systems frustrate survivors’ access to justice? Back home, the weekend saw a wave of reports, shared by women lawyers, alleging sexual harassment and abuse within Kenya’s legal profession, including claims of rape. Whatever the eventual outcomes of these matters, the lesson for those of us serving girls and young women is immediate: abuse thrives where environments protect power rather than people.
That is why structural changes in workplaces, institutions, and communities are not optional accessories to girls’ agency (the capacity of a girl to effect change in her life and that of her community). They are the conditions that determine whether agency can be exercised safely, consistently, and without punishment.
Several organisations in East and Southern Africa reach thousands of girls annually through a range of short- and long-term agency-building programmes. These initiatives complement academic programmes by enhancing girls’ self-belief, increasing their leadership and self-governance skills, and fostering the understanding that their environments support their empowerment and agency.
Some of these organisations, including a network of community-driven organisations in East and Southern Africa that reaches about 300,000 girls each year with these programmes, have made strides in building evidence linking higher levels of empowerment to improved educational and job outcomes.
Yet, after years of experience, these organisations note that agency is a catalyst, not a guarantee. A girl can be confident, trained, and ambitious, and still be blocked by hostile environments that punish her for exercising that agency. When reporting systems are unsafe, when professional networks protect perpetrators, and when retaliation is predictable, girls and young women adapt by withdrawing. They stay silent, avoid sectors, leave jobs, or accept coercion as “the price.”
In other words, agency without enabling environments becomes expensive to use.
Sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) is not a marginal problem; it is an environmental constraint.
To understand why structural changes matter, we must consider the scale of the problem. Across Africa, SGBV, especially intimate partner violence (IPV), is widespread enough to shape everyday decisions about schooling, mobility, work, and participation.
Figures from recent Demographic and Health Surveys in Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda, and Malawi indicate that between about one-third and more than half of ever-married women have experienced intimate partner violence, with Kenya’s survey also showing high lifetime exposure to physical and sexual violence among women aged 15 to 49.
These are not fringe cases. These levels of prevalence are high enough to become part of the “weather” girls grow up in, shaping what they think is normal, what risks they anticipate, and how much power they believe they can safely exercise.
Africa’s demographic dividend depends on whether a growing youth population can move into adulthood healthy, educated, and productively employed or engaged, especially girls and young women. Sexual and gender-based violence disrupts that pathway in predictable ways: it pushes girls out of school through trauma, stigma, coercion and unintended pregnancy; it limits mobility, participation and leadership because safety risks force girls and women to “self-limit” their choices; it keeps women out of work, or drives them out of jobs, when workplaces are unsafe; and it increases health burdens and household costs, weakening productivity and long-term wellbeing.
Therefore, when we talk about girls’ agency, we are also addressing national development. Unsafe environments are thus anti-dividend environments.
From headline outrage to workplace reform, why International Labour Organisation (ILO) Convention 190 matters.
The Epstein disclosures are horrifying not only because of what survivors endured, but because of what they reveal about systems: how wealth, reputation, bureaucracy, and networks can be used to suppress reporting and delay justice. The allegations against members of the legal sector, emerging within a profession presumed to be rights-literate, underscore that knowledge of rights is not enough when the environment is structured to punish complainants.
This is where the world of work becomes a decisive battleground for structural changes. One of the clearest global standards is the ILO Violence and Harassment Convention, 2019 (No. 190), along with Recommendation 206. C190 recognises the right to a world of work free from violence and harassment, including gender-based violence and harassment, and calls for practical measures: safe reporting channels, protections against retaliation, employer duties to prevent and respond, and accountability mechanisms that do not depend on the courage of isolated individuals.
Unfortunately, Kenya has not ratified ILO Convention 190. While ratification would not, by itself, end workplace abuse, it would nevertheless strengthen national alignment with a global framework and add momentum for coherent implementation across sectors. It would provide greater protection for interns, pupils, young associates, early-career professionals, and workers in informal or precarious employment, who are most at risk of coercion.
If agency-building is the engine, structural changes are the road, and the rules that determine whether the journey is safe.
In workplaces and professional bodies, including the legal profession, structural change requires more than policy documents. It requires enforceable architecture. Survivors need confidential, independent ways to report abuse without retaliation, and complaints must be investigated quickly and fairly, with real consequences, including referral to the justice system where crimes are alleged. Employers and professional bodies must prevent harm by enforcing codes of conduct and clear grievance procedures, and by publishing overall complaint trends and outcomes, without exposing survivors, so patterns cannot be hidden.
The next frontier is building systems that reward agency rather than punish it.
This moment, shaped by global disclosures and local allegations, is a reminder that girls’ agency cannot be built solely inside programmes. It must also be integrated into systems, institutions, workplaces, professional bodies, community structures, and justice pathways.
If we invest in agency while ignoring hostile environments, we risk making a promise we cannot keep, that skills alone will protect girls. Which is why it is crucial for organisations that serve girls and young women to align agency-building with systems change so that girls and young women can thrive, not just survive, in schools, communities, and the world of work. That is how we protect dignity, unlock productivity, and move Africa closer to the demographic dividend so often discussed, but too rarely made safe enough to realise.
Lucy Minayo is the Co-CEO of AMPLIFY Girls, an organisation dedicated to supporting community-driven organisations in East and Southern Africa that build girls’ agency and mobilise structural change to ensure their success
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In the past two weeks, public attention in Kenya has been seized by two different but deeply connected stories about power, impunity, and the cost paid by women and girls.
Globally, renewed attention to the Epstein files has revived an old question: how can sexual exploitation persist for years in societies that claim to have “strong institutions,” and how can systems frustrate survivors’ access to justice? Back home, the weekend saw a wave of reports, shared by women lawyers, alleging sexual harassment and abuse within Kenya’s legal profession, including claims of rape. Whatever the eventual outcomes of these matters, the lesson for those of us serving girls and young women is immediate: abuse thrives where environments protect power rather than people.
That is why structural changes in workplaces, institutions, and communities are not optional accessories to girls’ agency (the capacity of a girl to effect change in her life and that of her community). They are the conditions that determine whether agency can be exercised safely, consistently, and without punishment.
Several organisations in East and Southern Africa reach thousands of girls annually through a range of short- and long-term agency-building programmes. These initiatives complement academic programmes by enhancing girls’ self-belief, increasing their leadership and self-governance skills, and fostering the understanding that their environments support their empowerment and agency.
Some of these organisations, including a network of community-driven organisations in East and Southern Africa that reaches about 300,000 girls each year with these programmes, have made strides in building evidence linking higher levels of empowerment to improved educational and job outcomes.
Yet, after years of experience, these organisations note that agency is a catalyst, not a guarantee. A girl can be confident, trained, and ambitious, and still be blocked by hostile environments that punish her for exercising that agency. When reporting systems are unsafe, when professional networks protect perpetrators, and when retaliation is predictable, girls and young women adapt by withdrawing. They stay silent, avoid sectors, leave jobs, or accept coercion as “the price.”
In other words, agency without enabling environments becomes expensive to use.
Sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) is not a marginal problem; it is an environmental constraint.
To understand why structural changes matter, we must consider the scale of the problem. Across Africa, SGBV, especially intimate partner violence (IPV), is widespread enough to shape everyday decisions about schooling, mobility, work, and participation.
Figures from recent Demographic and Health Surveys in Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda, and Malawi indicate that between about one-third and more than half of ever-married women have experienced intimate partner violence, with Kenya’s survey also showing high lifetime exposure to physical and sexual violence among women aged 15 to 49.
These are not fringe cases. These levels of prevalence are high enough to become part of the “weather” girls grow up in, shaping what they think is normal, what risks they anticipate, and how much power they believe they can safely exercise.
Africa’s demographic dividend depends on whether a growing youth population can move into adulthood healthy, educated, and productively employed or engaged, especially girls and young women. Sexual and gender-based violence disrupts that pathway in predictable ways: it pushes girls out of school through trauma, stigma, coercion and unintended pregnancy; it limits mobility, participation and leadership because safety risks force girls and women to “self-limit” their choices; it keeps women out of work, or drives them out of jobs, when workplaces are unsafe; and it increases health burdens and household costs, weakening productivity and long-term wellbeing.
Therefore, when we talk about girls’ agency, we are also addressing national development. Unsafe environments are thus anti-dividend environments.
From headline outrage to workplace reform, why International Labour Organisation (ILO) Convention 190 matters.
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The Epstein disclosures are horrifying not only because of what survivors endured, but because of what they reveal about systems: how wealth, reputation, bureaucracy, and networks can be used to suppress reporting and delay justice. The allegations against members of the legal sector, emerging within a profession presumed to be rights-literate, underscore that knowledge of rights is not enough when the environment is structured to punish complainants.
This is where the world of work becomes a decisive battleground for structural changes. One of the clearest global standards is the ILO Violence and Harassment Convention, 2019 (No. 190), along with Recommendation 206. C190 recognises the right to a world of work free from violence and harassment, including gender-based violence and harassment, and calls for practical measures: safe reporting channels, protections against retaliation, employer duties to prevent and respond, and accountability mechanisms that do not depend on the courage of isolated individuals.
Unfortunately, Kenya has not ratified ILO Convention 190. While ratification would not, by itself, end workplace abuse, it would nevertheless strengthen national alignment with a global framework and add momentum for coherent implementation across sectors. It would provide greater protection for interns, pupils, young associates, early-career professionals, and workers in informal or precarious employment, who are most at risk of coercion.
If agency-building is the engine, structural changes are the road, and the rules that determine whether the journey is safe.
In workplaces and professional bodies, including the legal profession, structural change requires more than policy documents. It requires enforceable architecture. Survivors need confidential, independent ways to report abuse without retaliation, and complaints must be investigated quickly and fairly, with real consequences, including referral to the justice system where crimes are alleged. Employers and professional bodies must prevent harm by enforcing codes of conduct and clear grievance procedures, and by publishing overall complaint trends and outcomes, without exposing survivors, so patterns cannot be hidden.
The next frontier is building systems that reward agency rather than punish it.
This moment, shaped by global disclosures and local allegations, is a reminder that girls’ agency cannot be built solely inside programmes. It must also be integrated into systems, institutions, workplaces, professional bodies, community structures, and justice pathways.
If we invest in agency while ignoring hostile environments, we risk making a promise we cannot keep, that skills alone will protect girls. Which is why it is crucial for organisations that serve girls and young women to align agency-building with systems change so that girls and young women can thrive, not just survive, in schools, communities, and the world of work. That is how we protect dignity, unlock productivity, and move Africa closer to the demographic dividend so often discussed, but too rarely made safe enough to realise.
Lucy Minayo is the Co-CEO of AMPLIFY Girls, an organisation dedicated to supporting community-driven organisations in East and Southern Africa that build girls’ agency and mobilise structural change to ensure their success
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By Lucy Minayo