Rona Foundation Blogs

Recently, we collaborated with African Uncensored on a documentary capturing the lived realities of widows at mining sites in Siaya County. What emerged was not a story of moral failure, nor one of isolated vulnerability. It was a story of poverty — raw, structural, and deeply unjust.

At these mining fields, women — many of them widows — navigate economic spaces shaped by risk, informality, and male dominance. With controlled access to land, capital, or dignified employment, survival becomes negotiation. Widowhood, in this context, is not simply a marital status. It is economic displacement. It is the sudden collapse of stability. It is the burden of raising children with few choices and fewer protections.

What we witnessed in Siaya is not unique to Siaya. It is simply more visible there.

In over a decade of working with widows across counties and borders, I have encountered a recurring response whenever these issues surface: “We know this happens — but not in my family, not in my space.” Widowhood becomes something distant, almost abstract, something that belongs to “others.” Yet when I sit with our widow network — now more than 18,000 members — I am reminded daily that widowhood is no longer an older-life phenomenon. It cuts across ages 18 to 59. Many are young mothers raising small children. Many were widowed in their twenties and thirties.

I was widowed at 32.

So when I stand at a mining site or in the overcrowded beach markets of Siaya, looking into the faces of women navigating survival economies, I do not see strangers. I see a system that could have swallowed me whole. I see what happens when opportunity shrinks and judgment widens.

And I ask myself — with all the organizing, all the advocacy, even with a law recently passed to protect widows — why do we remain persecuted, marginalized, and overlooked?

The answer is uncomfortable. This is not just about widowhood. It is about poverty. And poverty, especially when it wears a woman’s face, becomes easy to moralize rather than address.

Too often, the response to these stories is empathy. Empathy is important. But empathy alone does not shift systems. Empathy photographs well. Empathy trends on social media. But poverty-inflicted injustice requires investment, research, and development-driven solutions. It requires those working in poverty alleviation to see widowhood not as charity, but as an economic justice issue.

At the Rona Foundation, our partnership portfolio reflects this understanding. We work with allies from unexpected quarters — corporate actors, faith institutions, women’s networks, and international employee giving platforms. The growing visibility of our widow network has attracted solidarity, but also criticism. Some recent attacks have emerged from sponsored male youth operating in economic spaces where unchecked behavior is normalized and women’s visibility is perceived as disruption.

This is not accidental. When widows organize — when they move from silence to structure — they challenge economic hierarchies. They challenge narratives that prefer them invisible.

Mining sites reveal something deeper about society. They expose what happens when excess human behavior meets economic desperation. Anyone studying social systems with a forward-looking lens can see the pattern: where poverty is concentrated, vulnerability is commodified. Where opportunity is scarce, exploitation grows in the shadows.

So what do we do?

We move beyond empathy.

We treat widowhood as a cross-cutting development concern — connected to land rights, labor systems, health access, financial inclusion, and social protection. We invest in research that maps widow economies. We design interventions that expand dignified work options. We measure the cost of exclusion not only in tears, but in GDP, in child outcomes, in generational stability.

Widowhood is not a side story in the poverty conversation. It is central to it.

The documentary may focus on mining in Siaya, but the deeper story is structural. It is about how societies respond — or fail to respond — when women lose economic anchors.

If we are serious about poverty alleviation, we must be serious about widows. Not as symbols. Not as seasonal causes. But as economic actors deserving policy, protection, and investment.

Because empathy may open the door. But justice requires us to walk through it — with systems, with resources, and with courage.

Roseline Orwa, a widow champion, and the Founder and Executive Director of the Rona Foundation, a Kenyan widow human rights organization. She tweets @roselineorwa