52-year-old Sabeti Mmboga was born in the rural areas of in Sabatia County, Kenya. From these humble beginnings, the first-born daughter of an uneducated farmer, Sabeti would grow with the hope of having her own family to take care of. She loves the imagination of her children playing around and calling her mom.
Sabeti was born OK, like other children but a few years later, still in her toddler stage, the 3-year old started to develop some form of difficulty while walking. “I was taken to a hospital in Kisumu County and was admitted but doctors still couldn’t cure me. There was no improvement.” She says. She was later diagnosed with polio which inhibited her walking up to date. She uses a stick to walk and can’t do long distances. This further forced her to drop out from school while she was in Class one, partly because both her parents died around that time and hence she would move from one relative to another who couldn’t afford to pay her school fees, and partly because her school was far and it was almost impossible to walk every day because of her acquired disability.
She currently owns a small grocery shop within her estate of residence. It’s her main source of income. She however recons that there’re still so many challenges she must deal with as a business woman and being there for her grand – daughters, whose parents are still struggling economically within the same slum.
Among the challenges she puts forward includes lack of water, the returns of her grocery are relatively low, She finds it difficult to meet the day-to-day expenses. Despite all her problems, Sabeti is a resilient woman, who has a positive attitude towards life. She is self-reliant and has never begged to have anything. In her own way Sabeti insist that she has worked for anything she owns now. She participated in The Action Foundation’s Street Business School to build on her business skills and among the most invaluable skills she has learned from the program is book-keeping and record-keeping. While she doesn’t know how to write well, her grand daughters help her in documenting her business records. She hopes to use her market research skills to start a new shop for selling paraffin, a demand she has realized while attending SBS classes.
She is thankful for the opportunity to have been part of the program, especially because if it was at a cost, she would not have made it. “I would however wish that more people knew and joined the program,” she adds. More awareness needs to be created to interior parts of the slums and even within the estates. More women with disabilities in the villages could benefit from the program.