 Ta-da, Karibu back to I-254 TV. Just like that, we are back. Thank you for still staying with us here at Wine the Morning, this being on Wednesday and this particular segment being Empowerment Cafe. I hope by now Tusha Zoya that truly move from strength of a woman to Empowerment Cafe. In this week's Empowerment Cafe, I have an interesting lady. She is Agmetha Alubarala. She is a communication strategist. She runs a business. She is a philanthropist. She does a lot of things. But the good thing is that she is here to talk to us about it. So, let's do what we do. Karibu Sana Agmetha. Thank you, Grave. You're well. Baridhi Mokpatawabi. Baridhi Mokpatawabi. You know, that's Kimmetha. Did it have to rain this morning? Just wondering. Not been raining. I love you just like that. One day, the one day we need to come to work at 4 or 5 in the morning is the one day that it rains. It looks lovely. Thank you. It's good to see you in person, Karibu Sana. So, who is Agmetha? So, Agmetha. My name is Agmetha Alubarala and I'm a storyteller. I tell stories for social impact. So, particularly in the areas of children, I love children and women. And so, I do that just to ensure that I try to give them a voice. And so, that's what I do. And other than that, I'm also a social entrepreneur. I run an agency known as Brand Muzo. And Muzo basically means beautiful in Guiriyama language. And so, that's why I call the Brand Muzo. Because what we are trying to do is just to create very beautiful brands, not only for people, but also for corporate and products. And so, and I'm also co-founder at an NGO known as Threading Child. It's a CBO. It also runs in Califi County. And that just links to what I say that I'm very passionate about children and women in general. You seem to have a, you have a rich mind. I think that's the first thing I said when I say, but you seem to have a lot you're doing. How does your day look like before we even get to talking about what you do? My day is usually normal, very normal. Looks like a day for any other person. Wake up in the morning, just look at my itinerary. What do I have to do today? But all the time, whatever I do just revolves around just telling stories. So, first of all, I want to look at the socials. What is happening within those spaces where we have children? What's happening in the children's spaces? What is happening in the women's spaces? And then with that, I'm just able to see what I need to plug in that day and just what I need to work around. So, yeah, I basically just work with the children. Maybe sometimes I mean Nairobi, sometimes in Califi, just on the ground to see what is happening on the ground. And Grace, a lot is happening on the ground. So, yeah, that's what my day looks like on a day and day basis. So, when did you realize you really wanted to tell stories? Since when I was a younger and I think initially my passion was in advertising, because from since when I was a little girl and always working in the supermarket and see products put on the shelves, I don't want to imagine what went behind that product. Like, sometimes you see an advert and you become so curious. So, what really went behind this thing was so that now we have the whole product. So, as I grew up, I became very interested in all that aspect. Just like if you're wearing that clothes, I want to, I really get curious, oh, this girl really looks beautiful in that dress. So, what is behind it? And so, as I grew up, I grew into the passion of that. Also, I really loved reading books. And my dad, I would say, is behind this because every time who'd go out, he'd come back with a book. And the passion of reading and just seeing how stories are brought out really pushed me into loving telling stories. So, as I grew, I just became so passionate about that. Even in school, primary school, my English teacher was also very supportive in this because he realized how much I loved telling stories. But the way you are telling that story is really captivating. But it's just because of a passion that really kept growing into me all through to campus and even up to now. So, you just tell general stories or you have a niche you've created? I used to tell general stories, but then as I grew up in my career, I just narrowed down to telling stories for social impact. So, mostly, I told stories in development communication. Stories about what is happening in marginalized places, how can we bring these stories to light so that these people can get the kind of help they need so that we can attract donors and such kind of things. Because every time I tell those kind of stories, I feel like I'm just trying to bring these people to light and just at least give them a platform that they can also be able to be seen and heard. So, that's why, for me, I always get to feel like I need to tell the stories. And perhaps also because I have lived in Kilifi and I have seen how much these people are not able to be understood because they are marginalized. So, it just gives me pleasure when I tell stories about social impact because when I see them in social spaces where if I had not sold them, they were not be able to be seen in those spaces, I just feel like I've just contributed to the community. And so, that's why I like telling social impact stories. Ah, amazing. So, how did you start Brand Muzo? So, when I finished campus, I moved into the industry. And so, what I did is that I went into an agency. So, I worked for a very long time, I worked with an agency. And so, this agency exposed me to most of the clients who are clients from the development industry. And so, most of the time, I would tell stories in the development industry. And so, this really gave me an insight of what it is just to work with the marginalized people mostly. And so, because of this, I thought to myself, I come from Kilifi County. Like, that is where I live. I'm married there. I also come from whatever, western Kenya. But, you know, western Kenya is out there. Already people know it. So, in Kilifi County, I realized that these people are marginalized and no one is telling their story. And so, I thought, first of all, this is a very beautiful community. Just look at all the, like how do I put, look at their tradition, all the things that they have, the tourism that happens at that place, the ocean, all those things. But really, no one understands why those people are still the way they are. Most of them are very, I would want to call them backwards, but let me just choose that one so that it's true. You know, sometimes when you put this information out in a railway, there's a way it just gives the real thing. So, I realized that these people, most of the time are really backwards and low and no one is telling their story. We find that issues like teenage pregnancies, there are a lot of teenage pregnancies, a lot of people are not going to school. And you wonder why, yet civilization began at around those places. So, I told myself, why not step in and tell these stories? And that's how Brand Muzo was born. Because I thought, if I use my agency to tell stories about these people, then I'm able to put them at least somewhere where they can be seen and they can get the help that they need. So, as I said earlier, Brand Muzo, Muzo is a Giriama word and it means beautiful. So, I thought, let me use a word that resonates to the people, but can also be translated in English to mean that we are trying to create something beautiful out of these people. And so, that is how I came up with Brand Muzo. Amazing. So, how's the journey been? I would say the journey hasn't been easy as always, but I love what I'm doing and I love where it's going because it's been a journey of around four years. And you know, entrepreneurship in Kenya is very hard. But for me, what I'm doing is what we call social entrepreneurship and social entrepreneurship that you're doing this entrepreneurship, but for the little profits you get, you're giving it back to the community. So far, so good. We've moved, we've done. For the Brand Muzo, the social aspect of it was that I decided, because of the statistic that we're having from Kilefi County, where we're having a lot of teenage pregnancies, and a lot of these girls are not going back to school. So, I decided what I'll do is, my social impact would be because I'm a woman first and I have a lot of passion towards women and girls. I would then take my social impact to be, my social good to be giving back to these girls who are, let me just call them victims, who are victims of teenage pregnancies. Sometimes people call them unwanted pregnancies, but I wouldn't want to call them that. And so what I do is that I just try to talk to them, and as I said, I do beautiful brands. So what I do is I do personal branding for them. I try to bring them out, speak to them, motivate them, and sometimes just link to them, them to opportunities that can be able to just give them a future once again. Because most of the time when they are faced with this, they feel like their futures have already been done with. And so what I try to do is just bring them back at least to be living into themselves once again. And so this program is called Kakun to Confidence. Like these girls already in a certain Kakun. So what I'm trying to do is bring them out and just give them the confidence they need to go on with their life. Yes. What are some of those lessons you've picked along the way as a storyteller and also with Bran Muzo? So what I've picked along the way is the needs for resilience. You know, most of the time you start something and you realize that it's just too much work. You can't continue doing it. And so every day you wake up in the morning and you tell, so what am I doing this for what reason? Why don't I just look for a job that I can just go to and get my paycheck at the end of the month. But then you realize if you do this, there's so many other futures that you're trying to cut short because you see already these people are already done with. And so they, it just takes one person to speak to them and they realize, oh, I still have a life. So every day when I see that these girls are realizing who they are, it keeps me going. It motivates me. And so that's why every day I wake up and I just realize I have to keep going. However much hard it is. Yeah, I knew it. So one of the, thank you for bringing up the issue of teenage pregnancies because one of the major issues right now in Kenya is the number of rising and plant pregnancies especially among the teenage. How do you think we'd be able to curb that? I think it's just one of the most important thing is policies. And for me, I feel like the education sector needs to bring in an aspect of trying to teach these children at a very young age. I know you have sex education in a curriculum, but it doesn't come out the way it's supposed to come out. We need to help these girls understand, not only the girls, because this is something that cuts across, because even in my work in Kilefi County, I've realized it's not just the girls alone, it's also the boys. Because you'll find it's a girl and a boy who sometimes it's not even the older people. So I think we need to bring these learnings early into the curriculum so that by the time they're becoming, they get to puberty, they're able to understand that if we do this, these are the results. Because sometimes they don't even know. They know yes, there's sex, but then they do not know the impacts of it. So I think we need to look at our educational policies and just try to change the curriculum so that we're able to talk to these children early enough in their lives to understand the impacts of what they are doing and what it creates in the long run. And secondly, we also need to incalculate it into the community. You find that the community sometimes don't understand the impacts of these things. And issues like GBV, you know, it creates, you find that a girl has been raped by a dad, a dad has been raped by an uncle. And most of the time you find that these people, the culprits are not taken to book. And so we need to go back to the community and talk to them about the importance of all these things so that they're able to know that it's not right for them to do this and it's not right for them to do that. Because you find a lot of times that it's the girl that is castigated and then the boy and the man and whoever else are let free. So we also need to bring these things to book. We need to bring them to the knowledge of the people in the community and it's all through empowerment, actually. And it's not only for the girl but for the entire community. Yes. There's a question we are asking to Donald, social media handles. I would want to engage you in it. Do you think there is an overemphasis of girl child empowerment, especially given that we are getting into the month of world where we celebrate the girl child in the month of March, do you think there is an over empowerment of the girl child? I wouldn't say really it's over empowerment because the people who are speaking about over empowerment, I think sometimes we've not gone back to the villages, back to the many generalized communities and just looked at what is in the ground. The girl is not over empowered. Neither is the boy. So I feel a lot of work still needs to go on because you go back to the villages, like for example, you go back to prolific until you realize that the girl still does not understand her right. She doesn't know what it takes to be a woman. She doesn't know what it takes to have a voice of her own. She still has to follow rules there have been. She still has to follow what the male figure in her life says. She still has to depend on the male for anything that she does. So I think there's still a lot that needs to go into these empowerment. But at the same time we don't need to leave the boy child behind because even in the same communities, the same marginalized communities, we'll find even the boy child is still a little bit marginalized. So I think we need just to put in more fuel and keep going. Amazing. So what has been the greatest challenge for you dealing with the marginalized community, especially with Bran Muzzo? So for me the greatest challenge that I found is in still I would say in storytelling. If I find these stories are not being told and even if they are being told, the picture being painted is not as grim as the one on the ground. So I think we still I would say that if more people get into back into the communities and just try to bring out those stories and if we would at least have some kind of technologies that would help people to be able to tell those stories in a more like real way, I would say things like virtual reality if we take them back to the villages and we are able to tell our stories in a way that even the person who needs to do these donations is able to see the real thing that is happening on the ground then at least I think would be able to tell the stories in a more better way and we will be able to impact the communities even much better. Are we doing enough? Not yet. We are not doing enough but we say we are trying but we are not yet there. Amazing. So what would you suggest we do that we get? Of course I know probably we will never do enough but in your opinion what do you think we could do to get towards them are enough? So for me I would throw it back to the government a little bit. I even like the government especially the county government. This is something that they are not doing. I feel like they are not putting the resources to the right places. For example give an example of I told you I'm also a co-founder at a CBI known as Thriving Child and so part of what we do is we look into schools and see how are these how is the education of these children how is the wash like how is the hygiene what how how is the aspects to do with water sanitation and health especially in schools and even in communities and you'd find that these people lack all these basic needs. You see like the basic needs we enjoy in Nairobi you have water you have food you have good hygiene they are not there you go to a school and you find a school has one toilet and one thousand children and then you find a school that does not even have what would they that not even have water in this child even when she goes back to the community there is no water so what happens because you find now they when you go back to the county you'll find they have a kitty for maybe early childhood education which is supposed to give into these things but that money doesn't get to the ground so what I'm saying is that I think I'll throw it back to the government where the government because it's it's the mandate of the government that every child gets good education every child gets all their basic needs because it's the right I think it's pegged in the bill of rights but then they're not getting this so that's what I'm saying I think we need to push the government especially the media would give you that challenge you really need to bring these two results and invite the government to this to to to such such like talks so that they're able to respond to these questions and then with that we'll push them to be accountable so that would be my suggestion you introduced thank you you introduced thriving thriving child that's where I was I was going to what what's thriving child so thriving child is a cbo it it it operates within kilify county and it works in the child rights spaces so other than child rights spaces also work with them you know when you're working within that you want to look at this child lives within a community so within this community who are the other people that's who are the others to call that that you can work with just to make sure this child thrives so work with the entire community and then mostly with focus on the women and again not bringing the issue of the teenage mothers because most of these children are productive teenage mothers dads and father both of them so yeah so we work in the child child rights spaces and we look at their education want to see how is the education want to see um how how how is their livelihoods like livelihood are they working are they are they receiving the right human they understand their their rights as children do they understand what they need to for them to survive in the communities as thrived children and for livelihoods want to see do this community they live with within have the right resources for them to be able to like support these children's to thrive so yeah that's those are the three pathways that we work with ah amazing amazing do you um know that you work with children and then you also work with our teenage girls and of course my extension uh boys one of the things that has been raising an emerging concern among the young people particularly the transition between teenage to young adulthood is identity crisis how what has been your experience with young people in the identity crisis so I would say grass back in the communities of identity identity crisis is really not a big problem because you see they already have their norms within them but when you start exposing this to them because of even technology you find there some of them who are a bit exposed so this I'm talking to those I'm talking about those ones who at least have seen the light but when you go back deep into the villages most of these girls don't don't have that issue of identity like they know this is what I am I'm a woman because they are taught by their grandmothers like you're a woman this is what a woman does and this is how a woman is supposed to behave so they do not have those issues until when they are now brought into light and now they realize oh so this has been happening in the spaces so that's why now we find that most of them when they're exposed to internet or technology now they start realizing oh I need to do this so that I look like this people so this is how a woman should look like and so now that's where the problem comes in that's where I said now that's where we come in with a personal branding training for most of them and so we just help them to realize that as much as you come from this village and as much as you do not have this this that is similar to that other girl in the city you are still enough be you be authentically you do you because you have something within your inlets that will help you just to grow out and be a woman that's because that's what I'm talking to you remember the yeah because now at the moment you start living someone else's life because now you want to be someone else who you are not so you struggle and within that struggling then you lose yourself and that's why you've been seeing girls killing themselves because they're not what they want to be and so we really train them you tell them as much as you are seeing grace looking that beautiful that is grace that is how she is you do not have to be grace you are casual take as casual so just stay you and within you there's something that god has blessed within you that will make you great so work on that thing so we just help them to try and realize what is this thing within me that will make me propel into the life that I want to be without necessarily living the life of someone else yeah what do you wish someone would have told you when you started storytelling as opposed to now like what do you know now that you wish you knew when you started that storytelling is just a craft it's a craft you really don't need to have all those papers or okay it's good to have them but it's something that you need you don't need to follow protocol to tell a story tell it as it is that is how it will serve that is how it will it will it will it will create an impact that is how it will impact to emotion because if you try to follow all the protocol somewhere along the way it will not it will not appeal to emotion because you know the the most important aspect of our story is is it appealing to emotion like if I'm telling you a story but the moment you start following protocol the moment you start doubting yourself the moment you start saying wow the moment you bring in that danganya ring do your story not lose meaning so just be real with your story telling that is something I wish someone told me when I started telling stories because most of the time I would struggle I'd write a story and then read the script and I'm like no this story is not it's not how it's supposed to be but you know it's not a matter of how it's supposed to be it's a matter of what is the real story because you're telling that story to create to at least make someone do an action so if you want to change the narrative then the person will not be able to understand the real aspects that you're trying to bring out and so they'll not give you the help that you want or you not get the impact that you want or you not get the results that you want you see yeah so that you be real and let the story just come out the way it's supposed to come out that is something I wish I knew especially when I was working in agencies I struggled I struggled you're trying to you're trying to find the words and you're trying to steal the words I want you know I want it to flow like at the end of the introduction I laugh but he high enough so you struggle like what you've been taught in class like and then I'm like oh so even now okay sometimes I teach I have a lecture so I try to tell my student please go natural flow all right if it flows but let the story flow the way it's supposed to just open up your mind and let it flow okay what will they want to tell a girl this morning or rather a young person this morning listening or rather watching you and they just want some a word to propel them just be you be you and let you yes because the moment you just yourself I assure you things will flow but the moment you want to live the life of another person the moment you want to make people like you by force it's not going to happen amazing yeah but if you're just yourself authentically you just I'm telling you grace it it just creates a lot of open doors like you people know this is grace we don't have to like go deep to understand her because if we just see how we know she's grace she likes smiling she's you know you don't have to force yourself to be someone who you're not be yourself and that will just work out amazing I'm being told our time is out but thank you so much for coming we really I really appreciate you really appreciate the work you're doing thank you for your time yeah and maybe if someone wants to reach out to yes that's what I actually wanted to tell you love the last thing finally I use that camera let us know where we can find you yeah so for both if you want to create a brand that is beautiful if you want to create a brand that will give impact to your products your personal brand to to to your corporate brand please reach out to brand mozo we are www.brandmozo.com on our socials you're on twitter or x you're on x at brand brand underscore mozo we are on highly on linkedin at brand mozo for thriving child we are looking for collaborations to be able to impact the children of kilify county so please reach us at thriving child cbo on our website and on our socials on linkedin reach us at thriving child cbo we really like to collaborate with you and just bring out help children thrive in this community thank you so much all right agnetta thank you for your time we really appreciate you thank you that was agnetta talking to us about what she's doing with the amazing uh teenagers of kilify not just the teenagers she's doing a whole lot in the philanthropy world in the in the community based organization and with her brand that is brand mozo i hope this morning you have been empowered we are taking a short break but i can see bal has something juicy coming up for you right next