Groots Kenya Founder-Coordinator Esther Mwaura Muiru talks about migration, Europe’s history of exploiting the African continent, the Issue of Europe’s Expertise Developing Approach and How to Effectively Create Space for Women Who Are Currently Living in Poverty.

Grassroots organizations operating together in sisterhood. GROOTS Kenya was founded in 1985 by six women who felt they were in positions of power and they wanted to use their energy to bring other women in poverty to speak up on their behalf. Esther Mwaura-Muiru is one of the founders and coordinator of GROOTS Kenya. This spring she was visiting the Austrian ministry of foreign affairs in Vienna where I had the opportunity to sit down with her and discuss her empowering work and how international development agencies can learn an awful lot from her strategies and her way of dealing with the world as it is today.
One thing “western” countries have to get rid of is this illusion that there are many people who want to move from their country and generally leave to stay in foreign countries. African people don’t want to go to Europe just to migrate. If they had opportunities in their own countries, if Europe never underdeveloped Africa by all this colonialism that happened, the extraction that happened, there wouldn’t be all this migration from Africa now. Until today Grassroots women are a women’s empowernment movement, politically enganging and taking responsibility to make Kenya a more sustainable living space.

Production: Rosa Liebe