Refugee women from South Sudan in Nakuru are increasingly embracing free business literacy classes in a bid to map their way to self-reliance.
The refugees say the quest for knowledge is hard but it is worth their effort after years of struggling towards self-susteinance which has always been a distant prospect.
Many agree that without a sustainable source of income in a foreign country, life is a daily nightmare.
With neither education nor a vocation, Maria Amar immigrated into Kenya as a teenager in 2005 at the height of civil strife in Sudan in 2005.
Since then she has been relying on family and friends in Kenya and South Sudan for daily survival.She is now a mother of five and without a source of income.
She says coping up at the expense of others is particularly harrowing and she wants to learn how to start a profitable business, sustain herself and her children.
The 34-year-old housewife is among 25 women, mostly widowed that have enrolled in a three months business literacy program courtesy of the South Sudan Gender and Women Concern (SSGWC).
Amar and her colleagues are part of 2.5 billion people in the world without a saving account meaning they cannot find access to loans and insurance even if they decide to set up a business.
Her predicament is replicated among other 217 women among refugees from South Sudan in various parts of the country and at the country`s second-largest concentration camp at Kakuma in Turkana County.