Joshua Leshan Kereto
Joshua Leshan Kereto, Kenyan activist has turned personal outrage into a lifeline for thousands of Maasai girls. In 2017, he founded Tareto Africa after witnessing peers forced into early marriage and female genital mutilation; today the grassroots network fields rapid-response teams that spirit at-risk girls to safe houses, negotiates truces with elders, and has placed more than 300 survivors on full scholarships. Kereto’s strategy weds cultural fluency to hard metrics: monthly barazas track FGM and child-marriage incidence village by village, while the flagship “Trees for Girls” program links climate-smart agroforestry with sessions on reproductive health, planting 40,000 seedlings and sparking frank conversations under their shade.
Tareto Africa now trains local women as paralegal advocates, partners with county hospitals on trauma care, and runs a mobile court circuit that has secured landmark GBV convictions. Kereto’s field reports inform national policy, and his storytelling featured from Kajiado classrooms to UN panels has reframed gender violence as both a human-rights and development crisis. Next up: a solar-powered boarding center that pairs STEM labs with livestock projects, ensuring rescued girls graduate with income skills as well as diplomas. At 32, Kereto is proving that tradition can evolve and that the strongest barrier against harmful rites is an empowered girl backed by her community.