This TED Talk features educator Kekenya Natia, recorded live at TED Women 2018.

To empower girls, you need to educate them.

That was my dream.

And so I build a school, and in the process, I learned something much bigger.

When you empower a girl, you transform a community. School is just

a start. I grew up in rural Kenya in a small village called Anasai. I was the first of eight children,

and I spent my childhood helping my mother cook, clean, farm, and take care of my siblings.

Like other Maasai girls, I was engaged from a very young age to be married.

But as I reached puberty, I underwent through female genital mutilation,

all known as FGM.

This picture shows some of the tools that I used to perform FGM on girls.

FGM was supposed to mark the end of my childhood and, by extension, my education. But I negotiated with

my father in order to stay in school even after going through

Afchina.

Years later, I went to university.

And in order to get my community support, I promised to come back one day to repay that

support.

But years later, when I went back to my village, not much had changed.

Girls were still going through FGM, still leaving school, still getting married to men older

than their fathers, and still having children when they're teenagers.

I did not want to see any more

girl go through that. That's when I

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