Ms Triona Pender:

It depends very much on the context. Action Aid works in Garissa, in Kenya, near the Somali border. It is very much men and it is a Muslim community. The whole idea was to try to keep girls in school and get girls back into school if they had dropped out after having children and so on. They were very much closed off to us. We are using a protocol of behaviour change that is a scientific approach to get people to change their behaviours. I will not go into the whole ins and outs of that but we sat with them and discussed why they did not want girls to go to school and why the local, community, and government leaders did not want that. They said that they had bigger issues in the community such as drought and underdevelopment. We did an analysis with them and they came to the realisation on their own that part of the reason they are so underdeveloped is because half of their population - the girls - are not in school. When one brings it around and they come to the realisation on their own that a lot of the time they are contributing to this themselves by not educating girls, then there is buy-in from them. It is a slow process. In many cases, especially at the top, there are politicians who do not have the issue on their radar as much. We have to work with the ones who will speak to us and who are willing to get involved.