IN the olden days there were no hooks or casting nets, so that when the natives wanted to catch fish they made baskets and set traps at the river side.
who was very poor, began to make baskets and traps out of bamboo palm, and then when the river went down he used to take his traps to a pool and set them baited with palm-nuts. In the night the big fish used to smell the palm-nuts and go into the trap, when at once the door would fall down,
and in the morning Akon Obo would go and take the fish out. He was very successful in his fishing, and used to sell the fish in the market for plenty of money.
When he could afford to pay the dowry he married a woman named Eyong, a native of Okuni,
and had three children by her, but he still continued his fishing. The eldest son was called Odey,
the second Yambi, and the third Atuk.
These three boys, when they grew up, helped their father with his fishing, and he gradually became wealthy and bought plenty of slaves. At last he joined the Egbo society, and became one of the chiefs of the town.
Even after he became a chief, he and his sons still continued to fish. One day, when he was crossing the river in a small dug-out canoe, a tornado came on very suddenly and the canoe capsized, drowning the chief, When his sons heard of the death of their father, they wanted to go and drown themselves also, but they were persuaded not to by the people.
After searching for two days, they found the dead body some distance down the river, and brought it back to the town.
They then called their company together to play,
dance, and sing for twelve days, in accordance with their native custom, and much palm wine was drunk. When the play was finished, they took their father's body to a hollowed-out cavern, and placed two live slaves with it, one holding a native lamp of palm-oil, and the other holding a matchet.
They were both tied up, so that they could not escape, and were left there to keep watch over the dead chief, until they died of starvation.
When the cave was covered in, the sons called the chiefs together, and they played Egbo1 for seven days,
which used up a lot of their late father's money. When the play was over, the chiefs were surprised at the amount of money which the sons had been able to spend on the funeral of their father, as they knew how poor he had been as a young man. They therefore called him the lucky fisherman. 1 The Egbo society wo
It’s hard to believe that a woman from a pastoral family in remote northeastern Kenya could grow up to be the CEO of one of her country’s most successful social enterprises. But entrepreneurship was always a passion for Jamila Abass.
As a child, she tended a small vegetable patch, selling the produce to neighbors to make extra income for their family. But her dreams were always much bigger.
“I grew up in a situation where having one meal on the table, you were counted lucky,” Jamila says. “I also grew up knowing that life shouldn’t be this way.”
Years later, this experience would motivate Jamila to start M-Farm, a female-led company that connects farmers to markets and each other, giving them price information over their mobile phones and the ability to organize.
This is helping them move from subsistence agriculture to commercial farming, creating a path out of poverty.
Close to 70 percent of Kenyans work in agriculture. But without information about how much crops are selling for from day to day, they’re often exploited by middlemen.
“There is a huge information gap,” says Jamila. “Farmers are good at what they’re doing, but they do not know who to sell their products to or how much to sell them for.”
The first 686 farmers using the M-Farm platform saw, on average, a 100 percent increase in their profits. There are now 14,000 farmers using M-Farm in Kenya and organizations across the continent are interested in partnering with them.
The company is for-profit or, as Jamila says, “making money while doing good.”
Jamila’s journey from northeastern Kenya was a long one, especially as a woman growing up in a patriarchal society.
“The society I came from, priorities were always given to the men because at the end of the day, a woman would be married off to someone else and she wouldn’t be able to contribute—so you invest in the boy.”
Despite this, Jamila received a scholarship to attend a prestigious high school outside of Nairobi, becoming one of the few people from her community to receive a quality education. From there, she received a scholarship to study computer programming in Morocco and became the first woman in her family to attend college.
“It’s shown over and over again that when girls are educated, they give back to their families,” she says.
Jamila is the perfect example: Even as she rose through Nairobi’s burgeoning technology scene, she couldn’t forget the struggles of her community back home.
“The thing that makes me keep going and doing what I do is my former life,” she says. “That is what inspires me. The more I knew that there are still people living in the situation I lived in, the more persistent I became.”
Jamila and her fellow M-Farm co-founders, Linda Kwamboka and Susan Oguya, don’t really see being a woman as a barrier.
“If you think this domain is for men, then too bad for you,” Jamila says. “It’s actually the best time to be a woman in technology. We all agree: We’re not just women in technology—we’re people who are making a difference in the world.”
It’s hard to believe that a woman from a pastoral family in remote northeastern Kenya could grow up to be the CEO of one of her country’s most successful social enterprises. But entrepreneurship was always a passion for Jamila Abass.
As a child, she tended a small vegetable patch, selling the produce to neighbors to make extra income for their family. But her dreams were always much bigger.
“I grew up in a situation where having one meal on the table, you were counted lucky,” Jamila says. “I also grew up knowing that life shouldn’t be this way.”
Years later, this experience would motivate Jamila to start M-Farm, a female-led company that connects farmers to markets and each other, giving them price information over their mobile phones and the ability to organize.
This is helping them move from subsistence agriculture to commercial farming, creating a path out of poverty.
Close to 70 percent of Kenyans work in agriculture. But without information about how much crops are selling for from day to day, they’re often exploited by middlemen.
“There is a huge information gap,” says Jamila. “Farmers are good at what they’re doing, but they do not know who to sell their products to or how much to sell them for.”
The first 686 farmers using the M-Farm platform saw, on average, a 100 percent increase in their profits. There are now 14,000 farmers using M-Farm in Kenya and organizations across the continent are interested in partnering with them.
The company is for-profit or, as Jamila says, “making money while doing good.”
Jamila’s journey from northeastern Kenya was a long one, especially as a woman growing up in a patriarchal society.
“The society I came from, priorities were always given to the men because at the end of the day, a woman would be married off to someone else and she wouldn’t be able to contribute—so you invest in the boy.”
Despite this, Jamila received a scholarship to attend a prestigious high school outside of Nairobi, becoming one of the few people from her community to receive a quality education. From there, she received a scholarship to study computer programming in Morocco and became the first woman in her family to attend college.
“It’s shown over and over again that when girls are educated, they give back to their families,” she says.
Jamila is the perfect example: Even as she rose through Nairobi’s burgeoning technology scene, she couldn’t forget the struggles of her community back home.
“The thing that makes me keep going and doing what I do is my former life,” she says. “That is what inspires me. The more I knew that there are still people living in the situation I lived in, the more persistent I became.”
Jamila and her fellow M-Farm co-founders, Linda Kwamboka and Susan Oguya, don’t really see being a woman as a barrier.
“If you think this domain is for men, then too bad for you,” Jamila says. “It’s actually the best time to be a woman in technology. We all agree: We’re not just women in technology—we’re people who are making a difference in the world.”
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