Two weeks ago, I awoke to the news of Rebecca Cheptegei's death at the hands of her partner. Cheptegei was a Ugandan long-distance runner who had just recently competed at the Paris Olympics. She was 33. My first thought was, not another one.
For those who don't know me: I was born in Rwanda during the 1994 genocide and spent the first three years of my life in Kenya as a refugee. Some fifteen years and a few years in Eswatini later, my family found its way back to East Africa, a region I consider home. Economically, the region has climbed, GDP rising across its thirteen countries, growth visible almost everywhere you look. Almost. Because the one number that hasn't followed the others up is the one that should terrify us. According to the UN, while other continents have seen gender-based violence decline, Africa's cases have risen.
The names that reach the headlines tell you GBV is everywhere. Agnes Jebet Tirop, 25, a rising Kenyan running star, stabbed to death in 2021 by her husband in her own home. Damaris Muthee Mutua, 28, found strangled in 2022 in Iten, the town that houses Kenya's competitive runners. And now Rebecca Cheptegei. Three women among an estimated 20,000 femicide victims in 2022, in Africa alone. If this is what happens to women visible enough to have their deaths counted, runners, Olympians, women with names the world half-recognizes, then ask yourself what is happening in the rural places, to the women who have no platform, no headline, no say in their own days.
The most dangerous place for a woman or a girl is her home.
According to the UN's 2023 femicide report, roughly 55% of all female homicide victims in Africa in 2022 were killed by intimate partners or other family members. Let that sit. If we are not safe in our own sanctuaries, where exactly are we supposed to be safe?
I have spent my career in the business of empowering women, financial inclusion, income, agency, resilience. I believe in it. I have watched it change lives. But I want to be honest about something the development world says quietly, if it says it at all: the very thing we offer women can put them in danger.
When a woman gains access to financial services and begins to earn, she can unsettle the arrangement her household was built on. A man who understood himself as the breadwinner, the decision-maker, the one whose expectations went unquestioned, may not surrender that quietly. Tirop, Mutua, Cheptegei, successful women, earning women, women whose independence was visible. I am not saying their success killed them. I am saying we cannot pretend the pattern isn't there. We hand a woman a tool for freedom and sometimes, in a home and a culture unprepared for what that freedom means, we hand her a risk. Anyone doing this work who hasn't sat with that discomfort isn't doing the work honestly.
So the question I keep returning to is not how do we empower more women, we know how to do that. The question is how do we do it without leaving them more exposed than we found them. And the answer, the one I am increasingly certain of, is that you cannot change the woman without changing the system around her. You cannot teach her to earn and then send her back alone into a household, a community, a set of norms that punishes her for it. The men in her life have to be part of this. The culture has to be part of this. Otherwise we are optimizing one variable in an equation we refuse to look at whole.
This is the unglamorous part. There is no metric that captures a husband who learns to see his wife's income as the family's gain rather than his own diminishment. There is no quarterly report for the slow, generational work of dismantling what a community believes a woman is for. It is easier to fund a training, count the graduates, and move on. But the counting is not the change. The change is in the system, and the system is the hardest thing in the world to move.
I fear that even the most thoughtful interventions, the prevention measures we take so deliberately, will not be enough. We set out to eradicate poverty and we underestimate, again and again, how much of a woman's stunted growth is not economic at all, it is cultural, inherited, enforced.
We cannot just change the woman. We must change the system. For it is the system that has, time and time again, failed us as women.
As an East African woman living and working in Chicago, my heart goes out to the African women fighting for a safe place to call home; to the women in South and Central America who give up their lives daily so their children might have better ones; to the women in Asia working tirelessly for even a sliver of agency; to the women in North America and Europe who have made tremendous strides and still work twice as hard to be seen; and to those who have lost their lives at the hands of the people they chose to build a life with. For Agnes Jebet Tirop. For Damaris Muthee Mutua. For Rebecca Cheptegei. For those who came before, and for those who will come after, if we don't do more.