SportPesa’s Tujiamini Community Awards has awarded KES 1 million to Grace Concern for All Gender iniative Founder and Applicant Lilian Tomee, a frontline women’s rights advocate in West Pokot, whose work is reshaping the future of girls facing female genital mutilation and child marriage in some of Kenya’s most vulnerable communities. The award, given under the Gold category, will support her organisation’s next major step: building a Community Resource Centre that will offer protection, mentorship, and economic empowerment for survivors.
For years, Tomee has led Grace Concern for All Gender – Kenya, an organisation that operates far from major towns or formal offices. Its work takes place on the margins of society, in remote villages where harmful cultural practices still define a girl’s destiny before she reaches adolescence. Here, FGM and early marriage remain everyday realities.
“Some girls wake up one morning as children,” Tomee says. “By sunset, they are married women with no voice and no choice.”
Her team conducts rescue missions, offers medical and psychosocial support, hosts education forums, and works with families to understand the value of keeping girls in school. But Tomee knows that rescue alone is not enough. Sustained change requires confidence, knowledge, income, and safe spaces that allow girls and women to rebuild their lives.
The coming Community Resource Centre in Nasolot Village aims to provide exactly that. With support from SportPesa’s Tujiamini platform, the centre will host:
• Vocational training in tailoring, agribusiness, and other income-generating skills
• Mentorship and leadership programmes for girls and young women
• A protected healing space for survivors escaping violence
• Community dialogues to reduce harmful practices and promote long-term peace
Tomee’s organisation also plays an unexpected but critical role along the West Pokot–Turkana border: peacebuilding. Conflict over cattle and land has lasted for generations, and women often bear the emotional and economic burden of these clashes. Grace Concern brings both sides together through dialogue and shared community programmes.
“We cannot protect girls without building peace,” she says.
The Tujiamini Gold Award will allow the organisation to break ground on the centre, scale its outreach, and reach hundreds of girls within the first year. Its long-term potential is far greater. By offering economic independence and social support, Tomee hopes to create generational change. Families will begin to see their daughters not as commodities, but as contributors, leaders, and agents of transformation.
“This is more than a project,” she says. “It is a movement. A movement for hope, for healing, and for possibility that SportPesa, through Tujiamini, is now part of.”
In Nasolot Village, the foundation of that movement has already been laid. With new support behind her, Tomee believes West Pokot is approaching a turning point. Tradition still holds strong, but the voices of empowered girls are rising. Whether they are silenced or strengthened will depend on what happens next, and whether the community – and the country – chooses to stand with them.