My first-term secondary school fees were paid by my mother after I had gone from place to place seeking help without success. She reached into her bosom, unfolded a worn, soiled handkerchief, and placed four hundred shillings into my palm. That was not just school fees. It was belief wrapped in sacrifice. With that, my journey began.
When I came of age, it was my mother who sent me to the river for the knife. Afterwards, she borrowed flour and made chapati, the only food available, so I would heal quickly. She taught me cleanliness with a simple theology: “Even God loves clean people.”
Through the cane and many nights of kneeling to pray the Rosary, which at the time felt like punishment, she shaped the Christian I am today. Discipline did not feel like love then. It does now.
She sent me on countless errands to fetch water. She taught me to till land that yielded little, though I often wondered why we labored so hard for such a small harvest. Today I understand: the work was never just about crops. It was about character.
Mankind often speaks of strength as though it lives only in muscle and noise. A woman’s strength stretches across many worlds at once, family, faith, scarcity, expectation, and dream. Not because she lacks choice, but because she chooses to carry what others depend on. She becomes the beam others lean on.
While the world sleeps, she is already awake, preparing food, planning the day, solving tomorrow’s problems before they appear. The load is heavy. The demands are real, but she carries them with quiet grace.
Communities stand because women guard them in invisible ways. They defend what matters, their children, their peace, their dignity. Women protect the unseen spaces where hurt tries to grow. When a woman protects, she is not merely shielding today; she is securing tomorrow.
Women also build, not just homes, but futures. What women build is generational. It is carried in the children they raise, the courage they quietly instill, the standards they refuse to lower. In classrooms, marketplaces, kitchens, churches, farms, and boardrooms, women are shaping tomorrow’s stewards of justice.
When a woman builds, a future stands taller than the present. Wangū wa Makeri, a rare female chief among the Kikuyu during the colonial era, led her people while stretching imagination itself. She dared to envision transformation in housing and order in ways that unsettled tradition. Whether one views her as reformer or instrument of the administration of her time, one truth remains: she disrupted expectation. She proved that a woman can see far.
A woman’s sensitivity, often mistaken for weakness, is strategic strength. She listens while noticing what others overlook; the quiet sadness behind a smile, the fear hidden in silence, the joy waiting to be affirmed. Her emotional depth fuels patience in difficulty. It builds trust. It resolves conflict. It nurtures peace where resentment could easily take root.
But honor must move beyond admiration.
Celebration must translate into shared burdens, equal opportunity, safety, respect, and space for women to lead without apology. To praise women publicly while exhausting them privately is hypocrisy.
And here lies the uncomfortable question:
How can men claim to celebrate Women’s Day while inequalities remain stubbornly present in our homes, workplaces, laws, and even our language? A speech cannot substitute for fairness. A social media post cannot undo structural imbalance.
This year’s theme, Give to Gain, calls for more than sentiment. It calls for generosity that multiplies. When men, organizations, and communities give, access, opportunity, protection, partnership, we do not lose ground. We strengthen it. Giving is not subtraction; it is intentional multiplication.
If celebration does not confront inequality through tangible support and shared responsibility, it becomes performance.
So today and this month of March, men must do more than applaud. We must examine ourselves. We must ask where we benefit silently from systems that disadvantage the very women we praise. We must choose partnership over dominance, listening over defensiveness, equity over convenience.
Only then will celebration carry integrity.
This month of March, we celebrate women, mothers, daughters, sisters, wives, colleagues, leaders. We celebrate unseen sacrifices, disciplined love, quiet endurance, and bold vision.
Strength does not always shout. Sometimes it wakes up early. Sometimes it prays through tears.
Sometimes it gives four hundred shillings to a young boy, who later returns to change the trajectory of a family’s life.
But looking back at that day mum sent me to school, I often ask myself; did she gain by giving?
Gichure HM Andrew
Director, eMentoring Africa