You could write a book about Ann Njogu’s career — from her history as a corporate lawyer who quit her job to work on human rights to her work on Kenya’s new constitution. She is a powerful force in the work to prevent and respond to gender-based violence in Kenya.

After Kenya’s disputed December 2007 presidential election, widespread violence erupted, leaving more than 1,100 dead and hundreds of thousands displaced. In the chaotic aftermath, Ms. Njogu worked with her institution, the Centre For Rights, Education and Awareness (CREAW), to document the sexual and gender-based violence that women faced. With CREAW, she drafted and disseminated simplified versions of Kenyan legislation so that women and girls could understand their rights. And together with others, she helped gain recognition of those rights by authoring and advocating for legislation on sexual violence.
For this, she has been arrested, detained, and assaulted several times. To recognize her work and her courage in the face of such adversity and violence, the State Department honored Ms. Njogu with the Secretary’s International Women of Courage Award (IWOC) in 2010.
I managed to catch up with the IWOC alumna while in Kenya, last month, for the 2015 Global Entrepreneurship Summit. Here are excerpts from our conversation:
How has receiving the IWOC award changed your work? And how is it perceived in Kenya?
Ann Njogu: The IWOC award served to strengthen me in my work and served to further validate the work that we do. More importantly, it served to strengthen the entire human rights defenders movement, because while I received the award, it was only for and on behalf of all the other sung and unsung heroes.
It also communicated to us that we were in a larger global community and that our work was important. The same values we were pursuing here were recognized in other parts of the world.
What’s the biggest change you’ve seen in the value of women and girls in Kenya throughout your career?
Ann Njogu: When we had the conflict in 2007, Kofi Annan, the lead mediator and former UN Secretary General, said that Kenya’s constitutional cloak had been cut too short to cover the nakedness of every individual Kenyan. With the realization of the 2010 constitution, we put in place the most progressive constitution in the world that has some of the most phenomenal gains, freedoms, and rights for women. Finally, Kenyans had determined  that the constitutional cloak  be made  long enough to cover all and guaranteed all people’s rights and freedoms.
The constitution for the first time recognized many rights and freedoms of women in an explicit manner, including the right to participate equally in governance and in leadership, the right to be protected from violence, the right to property.
The fact that our values were anchored on constitutional principles of equity, of social justice, of democracy for me has been the guarantee of the rights that we have as women to be equal to everyone else.
What’s the biggest challenge woman and girls continue to face here?
Ann Njogu: The downside of the constitutional promise is that the realization has become an uphill task. And it looks as though women have to go all out again and fight for the same rights that are already guaranteed in the Constitution. So when are we going to stop fighting? When are we going to sit back and start enjoying these rights and freedoms?
So that is our biggest challenge: Implementation. And when I think about some challenges that we struggle with at the moment, for me it is not a women’s issue but a constitutional one. If the women are threatened with the loss of their constitutional gains, the whole nation stands threatened. Because if we cannot protect and promote and respect the constitution vis-à-vis the rights and freedoms of women, how are we going to keep the promise in all the other areas?
Another challenge is the realization of women’s property rights. My own 77-year-old mother is currently an internally displaced person, ironically during peace time, for daring to stand up and claim her constitutional rights. Her home has been petrol bombed to defeat and frustrate the court’s allocation to her of her 50 percent share of property. Her family has been taken through horrendous trials and tribulations simply because she dared stand for her equal rights as guaranteed in the constitution.
So the question I ask is how will other women in the country and in her community dare to stand up for their rights if they risk paying the ultimate price?
It has to start from the home. Because it is such small gains at the personal level that translate into the community, national, regional, and international level gains and the realization of the whole human rights promise.
Otherwise they’re hollow rights.
Ann Njogu: Absolutely. When you look at the challenges that women have to continuously face and yet all these rights and freedoms and protections are enshrined in the constitution. It starts to make you very worried that unless we stand firmly for each of these rights, it will mean that the whole constitutional promise is “pie-in-the-sky.”
About the Author: Catherine Russell is Ambassador-at-Large in the Office of Global Women’s Issues.