Care work is the quiet engine of any society. When life unravels — a violent partner, an unplanned pregnancy, a clinic that does not understand disability — someone has to pick up the phone, listen, and help you find a way through.
In Kenya, one of the places that phone gets answered is Mama Siri, a toll-free helpline run by This Ability Trust for women and girls with disabilities facing sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) and sexual and reproductive health challenges.
Here is the twist: the people on the other end of the line are also women with disabilities.
This is not a feel-good CSR story. It is a sharp, evidence-based redesign of who we consider “essential workers” in care.
The numbers we do not like to look at
Kenya’s own data tell us two things very clearly.
First, persons with disabilities are not a small, marginal group. The 2019 census estimates that 2.2% of Kenyans — roughly 0.9 million people — live with a disability, and women make up more than half of this population. Global estimates suggest the real figure may be higher, at 16% but whichever number you pick, we are talking about hundreds of thousands of women.
Second, women and girls with disabilities are disproportionately exposed to violence and poverty. A submission to the UN on Kenya notes that up to 75% of women with disabilities are unemployed, and those who do work often earn less than both men with disabilities and women without disabilities. Research on informal settlements and global trends shows that women with disabilities are at least twice as likely to experience domestic and sexual violence, with some studies estimating that more than 80% will face sexual abuse in their lifetime.
Layer that onto a broader national context where roughly one in four Kenyan women aged 15–49 has experienced physical and/or sexual intimate partner violence, and the picture is clear: if you are a woman with a disability in Kenya, the system is not designed with you in mind.
Now add the economics.
New evidence on Kenya’s private sector shows that gender-based violence and harassment are not just a “social issue” — they carry real productivity losses, absenteeism, and health costs for employers. Violence is expensive. Prevention and early support are cheaper.
This is the landscape into which This Ability Trust has quietly inserted a bold idea.
Mama Siri: helpline, workplace, and quiet revolution
Mama Siri (Swahili for “woman who keeps secrets”) is more than a hotline number — 0800 000 300 for calls, 0799 000 300 for SMS, and *548# for USSD registration. It is a disability-inclusive care infrastructure that does three things at once:
- Provides accessible SRHR and SGBV support to women and girls with disabilities and their families through confidential information, referrals, and follow-up.
- Employs and trains women with disabilities as professional responders, working with clear protocols, supervision, and digital tools.
- Generates real-time data on what is happening in communities — which services exist, where the gaps are, and how public systems are actually treating women.
This Ability Trust could have gone the usual route: hire “experts,” consult “beneficiaries,” and call it a day. Instead, it centers women with disabilities as the experts. The “beneficiaries” are the workforce.
And that changes everything.
Why lived experience is a design feature, not a risk factor
If you have ever tried to report violence and been told to “go home and solve it as a family matter,” you remember that sting for years. Women with disabilities carry entire archives of experiences like this — clinic doors that are not accessible, nurses who talk to the caregiver instead of the patient, officers who do not believe a Deaf woman can testify.
So when a caller reaches a Mama Siri responder who also has a disability, there is immediate resonance: “I know what it feels like to be dismissed. I know what you are afraid of.”
That lived experience:
- Builds trust faster, which is essential when someone is deciding whether to disclose violence.
- Improves quality of referrals, because responders understand which facilities are actually accessible and respectful.
- Strengthens accountability, because responders know when a service provider is doing the bare minimum versus meeting its obligations.
This is not sentimentalism. It is a performance advantage.
Home-grown inclusion with macro-level benefits
Remote helpline work is a particularly smart match for disability inclusion in Kenya.
It reduces transport barriers, allows flexible shifts, and can be set up in rural and peri-urban areas where most persons with disabilities live. It means a woman who might otherwise be shut out of the formal labor market — because of inaccessible offices or rigid hours — can earn an income, gain skills, and support her community without having to leave it.
Every paycheck to a Mama Siri responder does triple duty:
- It stabilizes a household.
- It creates a role model — a woman with a disability seen as a community leader, moves away from the traditional framing of “victimhood or a “recipient of ”
- It anchors services in the community, because responders remain plugged into local realities rather than imported into them.
In a country wrestling with both high levels of gender-based violence and persistent unemployment among women with disabilities, this is not a side project. It is a policy prototype.
From pilot to playbook
There is a temptation to treat Mama Siri as a one-off “innovative project” rather than a scalable model. That would be a mistake.
Imagine if:
- Every national SGBV and SRHR hotline committed to hiring a significant percentage of women with disabilities as responders.
- Hospital call centers and county-level emergency lines reserved roles for people whose lived experience mirrors that of the communities they serve.
- Donors stopped funding disability inclusion as a side activity and started requiring it in core service delivery.
The ingredients are already in place: Kenya has an active disability rights movement, a growing digital health ecosystem, and a private sector now openly acknowledging the economic cost of violence. What is needed is the political will to treat models like Mama Siri not as charity, but as infrastructure.
Answering the call differently
At its heart, Mama Siri flips a very old script.
Instead of asking, “How do we take care of women with disabilities?” it asks, “What happens when women with disabilities are the ones taking care of us?”
The answer is surprisingly simple: services become more trusted, more accessible, and more grounded in reality. Data becomes sharper. Households become more secure. Communities see women with disabilities not as objects of pity, but as professionals holding the line in moments of crisis.
When the people we have historically overlooked become the people we depend on, that is not just an employment statistic. It is a cultural reset.
And in a country where the cost of violence is counted in hospital bills, lost jobs, and empty chairs at family tables, picking up the phone and choosing inclusion is not just the right thing to do. It is the smart thing to do.