Mama Sarah Obama and her charitable foundation Safeguard Widows & Orphans (S.O.W.O) will be awarded the 1st Annual Kenya Marathon Dinner Leadership Award on Friday, October 9th, 2015.
She was recently also a recipient of the Education Pioneer award at the United Nations on Wednesday as part of its Women’s Entrepreneurship Day and has spent much of her life helping young people — and particularly young women — in her region get an education.
President Obama’s last surviving grandparent, whom he referred to as Granny in his memoir Dreams from My Father, never went to school herself, she tells NPR’s Scott Simon through an interpreter.
“It was very hard for women to get an education,” when she was growing up, the 94-year-old Obama says. “Only young boys or men were allowed to go to school.”
But things are different in Kenya now, she says. United Nations data actually shows a higher percentage of Kenyan girls going to school than Kenyan boys.
“I encourage them — even the ones who have had families at a young age — I encourage them to go to school so that the cycle of poverty can end,” Obama says. She sometimes uses her grandson as an example of the doors an education can open.
“I help the orphans and widows, especially the young girls who have been orphaned by their parents dying of HIV,” she says. “I am their sole parent right now, so I help them pay school fees and also get them the things that they need, like sanitary towels, books, necessities like a pencil, school uniforms. That’s what I do.”
Listen to the entire interview below.