The Silver Voice Alliance

Overview

The Silver Voice Alliance (SVA) is a bold, elder-led advocacy and alliance-building initiative spearheaded by Hope to Live Charity Organization. The project exists to confront and dismantle the systemic exclusion of older women (aged 60 years and above) from healthcare decision-making, nutrition policy, and social protection systems in Kenya.

For decades, older women have remained invisible in policy spaces—despite being caregivers, community anchors, and custodians of social wellbeing. The SVA challenges this injustice by placing older women at the center of power, advocacy, and accountability.

The Problem We Are Addressing

Older women in Kenya experience layered and intersecting discrimination rooted in gender, age, poverty, and social norms. While policies on healthcare and nutrition exist, they are often designed without the participation of older women and fail to reflect their lived realities.

Key challenges include:

• Exclusion of older women from policy and budget decision-making
• Limited access to age- and gender-responsive healthcare and nutrition
• Ageist and patriarchal norms that silence older women’s voices
• Weak accountability mechanisms for duty bearers
• Minimal representation of older women in civic and advocacy spaces

As a result, decisions affecting older women’s lives are routinely made about them, without them.

Our Solution: A Power-Shifting Model

SVA is not a service delivery project. It is a power-shifting intervention.

The project organizes older women into Silver Councils, a collective platforms where they build advocacy skills, document rights violations, develop shared policy demands, and engage directly with decision-makers. Through alliances with feminist organizations, youth advocates, media actors, and civil society, older women transform lived experiences into political influence.

This approach redefines older women from passive recipients of aid into active rights-holders, advocates, and leaders.

What We Do

1. Formation of Silver Councils

We establish and strengthen Silver Councils composed of older women leaders who:

• Identify priority issues affecting their health, nutrition, and dignity
• Receive training in advocacy, leadership, and rights awareness
• Serve as collective voices engaging communities and policymakers

2. Participatory Evidence & Testimony Collection

• Older women document personal and collective experiences of exclusion, discrimination, and neglect. These testimonies become:
• Evidence for advocacy and policy engagement
• Tools for media engagement and public accountability
• Records that counter systemic invisibility

3. Policy Advocacy & Direct Engagement

Silver Council representatives engage directly with:

• County Health and Social Services Departments
• County Assemblies and Budget Committees
• National-level policy actors

Advocacy aims to secure formal commitments, budget considerations, and institutional reforms that reflect older women’s needs.

4. Media and Public Accountability

Through radio advocacy, public forums, and community dialogues, the project:

• Amplifies older women’s voices in public discourse
• Challenges harmful narratives about aging and gender
• Increases public pressure on duty bearers to act

5. Intergenerational Feminist Alliances

The project intentionally builds solidarity between older women and youth feminist advocates. These alliances strengthen movement sustainability, bridge generational divides, and expand advocacy reach and protection

We Work With

• Older women aged 60+, particularly those in marginalized communities
• Women-led and feminist civil society organizations
• Youth feminist and community advocates
• Media professionals and community journalists
• County and national duty bearers in health, social protection, and budgeting
• Our Feminist and Human Rights Lens

The Silver Voice Alliance is grounded in a feminist, rights-based approach that recognizes older women as political actors with agency and authority. The project challenges patriarchal norms that marginalize women in later life, geism that frames older women as dependent or irrelevant, and power structures that exclude women from decision-making

Expected Impact

Through this intervention, we expect to achieve the following:

• Increased participation of older women in policy and budget processes
• Formal commitments by county governments to address older women’s health and nutrition
• Greater public recognition of older women’s rights
• Strengthened feminist alliances advocating for aging justice
• A replicable elder-led advocacy model for Kenya and the wider African region
• Sustainability and Long-Term Vision

SVA is designed to outlive the project period. By building leadership, alliances, and institutional engagement, Silver Councils continue functioning as advocacy platforms, policy gains create lasting structural change, and  intergenerational alliances ensure continuity of the movement

Our long-term vision is an Africa where older women are visible, powerful, and protected, and where policies are shaped by those most affected.

Who Is Leading This Work

The Silver Voice Alliance is led by Hope to Live Charity Organization, a national, grassroots-rooted PBO established in 2022 and based in Kisumu, Kenya. Hope to Live works with local organizations to advance the rights, dignity, and wellbeing of older adults, particularly older women, through feminist organizing, advocacy, and alliance building.