For the past 25 years, Josephine and Patrick Ngigi have dedicated their lives to providing shelter to girls at risk of undergoing female genital mutilation (FGM) and early marriage, rescuing hundreds of girls.

Mission with a Visions work takes place in Narok and Kajiado county, which are FGM hotspots and home to the Maasai, one of the communities that continues to practice FGM despite it being against the law. Working with local leaders, the Kenyan Childrens Department and local police, the missions work has had a significant impact both on the girls who have been rescued and, increasingly, on local attitudes toward this practice.

As well as running the safehouse, which can accommodate up to 60 girls at a time, Mission with a Vision also takes responsibility for each rescued girls education, offers a reconciliation service working with community elders and the girls families. The objective is to change public opinion so that FGM and childhood marriage are not just illegal in Kenya but socially unacceptable.

Since partnering with Mission Direct in 2014, Mission with a Vision has been aiming to become self-sustainable for food with its five-acre Enkishon Farm Project, which includes dairy cows, goats, pigs, ducks, chickens, and crops. Mission Direct has helped erect farm buildings and now we are aiming to help the organisation build much needed further accommodation as well as providing space for a vocational centre to provide tailoring training opportunities and and income to support the safehouse financially, and an office to provide advocacy and outreach work to help spread the End FGM message.

Patrick says: Through Mission with a Visions sponsorship scheme some of our girls have gone on to become lawyers, teachers, midwives and hotel workers. They have all become defenders of girls rights. All girls deserve the opportunities to reach their potentials not be cut, married and becoming mothers when they are just children themselves. Their stories are out most powerful tool in helping to spread the message of education for girls.

Josephine, who herself underwent FGM as a teenager, says: As a non-profit organisation, we understand that self-sustenance plays a great role in securing our continuity. We have seen a need for vocational training for some of our girls. We have started offering tailoring training and the first five girls graduated last year, and our hope now is to introduce more courses and build some classrooms to ensure that we can give the girls who are not able to join formal schooling skills that will give them financial security for their future."