A caregiver’s effort to give rescued girls decent future

Elizabeth Mokkonen, the founder of Cofad, at her rescue centre in Kisumu. [Denish Ochieng, Standard]

Furaha, not her real name, was until last year a Class Three pupil at a school in Kisumu’s Nyalenda. Just like any other pupil in her class, she would occasionally drift to wonderland, fantasising how her future, long after school, would be. But all that now is a distant dream.

Furaha was defiled by a regular customer to her mother’s brew den in Nyalenda B Estate. The 13-year-old, a mother of a three-month-old baby, is now part of the statistics of teenage pregnancies which has dogged the country, even as safety of women remains a major issue.