Plans to establish a Sh9 million special unit for Mother and Child at the Embu Women’s Prison is underway to improve the living conditions and welfare of children living alongside their incarcerated mothers.
Principal Secretary (PS) for Correctional Services, Dr. Salome Beacco, welcomed the initiative by an NGO, FreedomWithin Kenya, stressing that the Government was keen on upgrading daycare and child-friendly facilities across 46 women’s prisons to shift the criminal justice system from being punitive to being a rehabilitative model.
According to the PS, the State Department for Correctional Services is leveraging partnerships to advance the envisaged reforms.
Dr. Beacco added that the government is also committed to ensuring that every person under its care is treated humanely, with compassion and respect, in accordance with the Kenyan Constitution and international human rights standards.
The effectiveness of correctional services, she noted, depends on the professionalism and discipline of all officers, who are entrusted with the care and rehabilitation of incarcerated persons.
“We appreciate FreedomWithin Kenya and its partners for supporting the establishment of the Embu Mother and Child Care Unit. Your support is restoring hope, health, safety, hygiene, and dignity to children while providing their mothers with a more conducive environment to undertake rehabilitation and vocational training,” the PS expressed.
Speaking during the groundbreaking ceremony, Dr. Mary Waceke Thongoh-Muia, Partnership Lead at FreedomWithin Kenya, called for greater collaboration among government, corporates, foundations, professional organisations, communities, and individual well-wishers to address the plight of innocent children living in prisons with their incarcerated mothers.
“A prison environment was never designed with an infant or young child in mind. Our responsibility is, therefore, to ensure that where children must live alongside their mothers, their basic needs for safety, hygiene, nutrition, play, learning, and nurturing are not overlooked,” urged Dr. Thongoh-Muia.
The event also witnessed the commissioning of a newly built Sh4 million WASH (Water, Sanitation and Hygiene) facility, designed to provide a safer, healthier and more child-friendly environment for mothers and young children.
The facility comprises child-friendly toilets and showers, handwashing facilities, a laundry area, baby-changing amenities, disability-inclusive toilets, a water tower, two 5,000-litre water tanks and a water reticulation system.
The facility was built with seed funding from the Napier Fellowship USA, awarded to Ms. Shakinar Mutulili, a co-founder of FreedomWithin Kenya.
However, the project cost excludes architectural and project management support provided pro-bono by Triad Architects, as well as administrative and coordination support provided by FreedomWithin Kenya.
Nonetheless, the soon-to-be built mother and child unit has benefited from kind contributions from family, friends, and the Triad Foundation. Triad Architects also offered pro-bono architectural and technical support with the Kenya Prisons Service providing institutional leadership, access to the project site, and technical guidance, ensuring the project is executed within the prison environment.
The Embu project is the latest milestone in the organisation’s journey that began in 2018, when Shakinar and her sister Ms. Naikena, then teenagers, began mobilising their peers through food and diaper drives to support children living alongside incarcerated mothers.
By Michael Omondi
