In July 2024, Everlyn Namai dreamed that her missing cousin, 26-year-old Josephine Owino, came to her for help. “I’m here in the cold, in the water. Why have you left me here? Come get me,” Namai recounted Owino saying in the dream.
This and other dreams reportedly experienced by Owino’s family members led to the shocking discovery of 10 sacks filled with dismembered body parts of at least eight Kenyan women. A local man, whom Owino’s sister, Peris Keya, had paid to look for her sister’s body, found them in a quarry-turned-dumpsite in a Nairobi slum. Ironically, the dumpsite is opposite a police station whose officers offered Keya little to no help in her search for her sister.
Alongside rising awareness of femicide in Kenya, this case led to the #EndFemicideKE protests in December 2024. Protesters marched in Nairobi and other counties under the banner #TotalShutDown, “Stop killing women” and “Say their names” to highlight the grisly murders of Kenyan women. They were met with violent police force and unlawful arrests. Protests around the issue had also been held in early 2024.
To shed light on the scale of femicide in Kenya, data journalists from Africa Uncensored and Africa Data Hub, led by Odipo Dev, a world class data studio based in Nairobi that specializes in providing data-driven insights to different audiences, set out in 2022 to create a database called Silencing Women. The resulting product offers insights into femicide cases reported between 2016 and 2024.
The database
The inspiration for the Silencing Women database arose from a previous collaboration, explained Odanga Madung, co-founder and managing director at Odipo Dev. “We used to work in this consortium called Missing Voices, and we built this police brutality database that was very interesting in terms of how movements were using it to advocate against police brutality,” he said. “It's in that same spirit that we started working on the Silencing Women project.”
The team spent a year using keywords such as “woman,” “girlfriend,” and “murder” in Advanced Google search to find English-language articles about the murders of Kenyan women and girls. They read through thousands of search results to determine which cases should be classified as femicides.
A femicide needs to meet at least one of the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime’s eight-point criteria:
- The homicide victim had a previous record of physical, sexual, or psychological violence/harassment perpetrated by the author of the killing
- The homicide victim was a victim of forms of illegal exploitation, for example, in relation to trafficking in persons, forced labor or slavery
- The homicide victim was in a situation where she was abducted or illegally deprived of her liberty
- The victim was working in the sex industry
- Sexual violence against the victim was committed before and/or after the killing
- The killing was accompanied by mutilation of the body of the victim
- The body of the victim was disposed of in a public space
- The killing of the woman or girl constituted a gender-based hate crime
The journalists also searched the National Council for Law Reporting, also known as Kenya Law, for court cases related to these murders in order to determine how long it took for justice to be served, if at all.
What they uncovered
The team of data journalists discovered that 628 cases of femicide occurred between 2016 and 2024 in Kenya. There were 127 cases in 2024 alone, which is the highest number of cases on record and is a 55% increase over the reported femicides the previous year.
The data also revealed that being married or in a relationship is the riskiest situation for a Kenyan woman. Most murders took place at home (72%), and husbands (40%) and boyfriends (23%) were the most common perpetrators. This counters societal beliefs that staying home is a way for women to stave off dangerous attacks.
Convictions of femicide increased by 118% in 2024 over the previous year, and the average sentence for convicted perpetrators was 23 years, even for those who pleaded guilty, indicating an effort by the court to recognize the severity of the proliferation of these murders.
Impact of the database
As the Kenyan government does not have a proper data management system to track femicides, the database has become a go-to resource for journalists, academics, policymakers, activists and civil society organizations working to understand and convey how pervasive the issue is, and advocate for solutions.
Outlets such as The Conversation, Equal Measures 2030 and Citizen TV — Kenya’s most viewed TV channel — have used the database as a foundation for their coverage of femicide. It was also referenced by a judge when sentencing Jowie Irungu to death for murdering businesswoman Monica Kimani in Kenya’s most publicized femicide case.
Kenya’s most popular band, Sauti Sol, even shared findings from the database when writing and promoting their song, “By The River,” which touches on femicide in the country.
In response to the general outcry, Kenyan President William Ruto set up a 42-member task force known as the Technical Working Group on Gender-Based Violence Including Femicide to evaluate and suggest enhancements to Kenya’s policies for addressing gender-based violence (GBV) and femicide.
What’s next
Madung and his team have made their methodology publicly available so that others can check their work, and use it themselves. They are still actively crowdsourcing data, too, in a bid to expand their accuracy; for instance, to expand the work into non-English languages also spoken in Kenya. (The current methodology relies only on English-language news reports, likely omitting incidents reported in the other languages.)
Despite the limitations, Madung believes these numbers are better than none: “When I think about the vision of what the [Silencing Women] project ideally should be, it's about ‘how do we enable Kenya's women to come together around a single-issue political cause and build leverage around it?’”
Photo by Monstera Production via Pexels.
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