NONDO was founded in 2011 when the founder, Mr. Harun Maalim Hassan was involved in an accident which ensured he would never walk again. He chose to wheel into the future, leaving his public administration career to study disability rights. In this way he shifted perspectives, seeing the disenfranchisement of Persons with Disabilities in Kenya and started NONDO with a few friends too advocate for the rights and inclusion of Persons with Disabilities in Kenyan Society.

Women with disabilities from nomadic and pastoralist communities exist on the margins of existing vulnerable demographics. They often have to overcome immense economic, social and cultural difficulties in order to participate on equal footing. The unique sociocultural contexts from which they emerge are hardly ever represented in business, leadership and governance spaces, resulting in an ever-widening gap between women with disabilities from nomadic and pastoralist communities and the rest of society. There are many obstacles to women with disabilities’ equal participation in business, leadership and developmental agendas. These include gender and disability stereotypes, a lack of resources and psychological unpreparedness.

These challenges often deter most women with disabilities from participating, and where they overcome the obstacles their impact is not felt due to a leadership skills gap. Feminism’s rallying call that the personal is political basically speaks to how our identities and subjective experiences inform how we respond to and in turn how systems respond to us. It calls for acknowledgment of individual experience because it is our lived realities that shape our theories, motivations and actions in the day to day. For women with disabilities, the personal becomes political due to the intersection of gender, disability and vulnerability to poverty. For women with disabilities from nomadic and pastoralist African communities, there are added intersections of ethnicity and geographical marginalization.

All these identities, even though they are experienced at an individual level, interact with systems to create outcomes which undermine voice and leadership for all women with disabilities. In recognition of this, there is a drive for more to be done to support women with disabilities transformative leadership of the institutions and processes that perpetuate the gendered inequalities of wealth and power and that reinforce the denial of women’s rights. The idea is to radicalize the leadership of women with disabilities from nomadic and pastoralist communities,giving particular targeted support and empowerment to transformative leadership that seeks explicitly to challenge the inequalities of the systems they participate in. Transformative leadership has to be reflected from the inside out. A radicalized woman with disability in a position of leadership will be better placed to contribute to development agenda with a critical lens that pushes back on the status quo than one who has not stepped into the fullness of their identity.