She’s best known for her brilliantly witty and insightful Edinburgh Fringe reviews. But for the last sixteen years Kate Copstick has also run Mama Biashara, a charity which allows women in Kenya to set up businesses and support themselves and others.
There is always a sense of disconnect (to put it mildly) when I am out here in Kenya.
But in the time before the Fringe takes Edinburgh in its greedy grasp, it becomes a sense of chasm. Although I know that is not, actually ‘a thing’.
My inbox is full of templated press releases about comedians (I use the term loosely) who “need” a review. “Deserve” a review more than the next 1300.
After sixteen years as Mama Biashara – look us up, we have a website and everything – my idea of “need” and “deserve” have changed quite a bit.
The main question is “if you do not get a review, will you die / be beaten to a pulp / be forced into prostitution/ watch while your daughter has everything between her legs reduced to hamburger meat and is then sold off to some OAP with spare cows to spend ?”
And if the answer is no, as I suspect it might be in most cases, then you do not ‘need’, you ‘want’.
Welcome to Edinburgh, everybody wants.
Yesterday I met with fourteen groups of ladies, all forced into prostitution, all regularly beaten up (and when Kenyan men beat women they deliver a five star beating) and most earning 35p for the full nasty.
One great thing about these ladies (and there are many) is that they know how to do business, when given half a chance. And now they have all been given more than half a chance. One group who had been selling themselves for 35p a pop will now be selling thorn melon for £2.50 a pop. Their kids will be fed and go to school. Quite something when you consider that, doing it the Mama Biashara way, funding this group of 14 ladies cost about £120 in total.
Mama B was born in 2008, after the post- election violence. The first group of rescued ladies (and kids) were sleeping under bushes in parkland on the outskirts of Nairobi – which was burning. Of course some of the big charities sent food aid to the ‘refugee encampments’ but, when all your logistics are in an office somewhere and your sackloads of rice are just rolled off a flatbed onto the ground (and the boxes ticked), you cannot expect any of that rice to get to the people who really need it. Too many businessmen in the way. Too much easy money to be made.
So Mama B went, rescued a dozen women who were hiding and, the next morning when I asked them how they wanted me to help, they said that, before the violence, they had each had a small business : one sold panties, one tea and mandazi (a sort of doughnut with most of the fun sucked out of it), one green veg … those sort of things. They said that if I could help them just restart those businesses, and this has never left me, and will never stop impressing me, “we will take it from there”.
So I did, and that is basically what Mama B has been doing ever since.
Rescue – relocate – business plan – fund – they take it from there.
These women are awesome. It is a privilege to help them ‘take it from there’.
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