Starting again with a new business

"In some homes, your immediate friend is your husband," says 43-year-old Pamela Anyango, who lives in Kibera. After 26 years of marriage, she lost her husband to stomach cancer. Without a source of income, she turned to different people for loans but her failure to repay them resulted in death threats and beatings from thugs. Eventually she managed to start a small business, which was later destroyed by rioters in the post-election violence that gripped Kibera for several months. She sought help from the Institute for Development and Welfare Services and it linked her to one of its groups. "I was a little discouraged at first, right after the violence, but then I realised I had to start again." Some three years later, she runs a fish stall in the market and can afford to keep her children in school and off the streets, where they could easily become involved with drugs or join gangs. Anyango hopes to be able to secure her children a way out of the slums through education, because the other alternatives have been exhausted. "My husband left me a plot of land after he died, but his relatives took it away from me. I tried to report this but nothing happened. I went to the chief there but he said the land is theirs and so am I. In order to get justice, I would have to travel to my village and that's difficult because I don't have money."