Rona Festival

The popular annual Festival is a culmination of advocacy and awareness activities and brings together over 3,000 participants amongst them stakeholders, widows and orphans, youth, church and community elders from far and wide.

The stakeholder and advocacy is the most successful of all activities. Apart from drawing large crowds, they attract key leaders of the community including the Governor of Siaya county who attended the final stakeholder forum of the year at the Rona widows Festival 2017.

These forums are full of life and draws widows from all the locations in one place, some even across the islands of Lake Victoria. In these forums, public policy issues touching on women and widows are discussed. Of note has been the need to introduce a widows bill into county parliaments, something that the Siaya county Governor, Cornel Rasanga was excited about and has made a commitment to support it.
The skits, songs, plays and poems are carefully scripted to humourise various forms of gender based violence, including widow cleansing and abuse, hidden in the unspoken harmful cultural beliefs and practices. The event awards certificate of participation to winning groups and showcases talent for the youth and orphans who some have gotten sponsors from the event.