Martina Chepkemoi Ruto was last seen at Lalagin Secondary School, in Litein, on Wednesday 26 August. She taught Kiswahili and History there. For the days that followed, her family circulated her photograph and a phone number, asking anyone who had seen her to come forward.
Her body was found in Kericho. Police said a preliminary examination showed stab wounds to the chest, and that they had opened an investigation into her killing. They have not said more about the circumstances, and no arrest had been announced by the time I finished writing this.
I knew her. We went to primary school together, and I was briefly in secondary school with her elder brother. She was a whole person to me long before this happened, and that is exactly why it hurts the way it does.
I should say plainly that this is not a neutral piece. I am writing about someone I knew, and about a police officer I once telephoned for help understanding a different killing. Both of those relationships shape what follows.
The brutality of it has pulled my mind back to the violence Kenyan athletics has absorbed over the past five years, and to how little our response to it seems to change. We make noise. It never quite seems to land.
That is my argument, and I want to be direct about it. Kenya does not have a shortage of promises on gender violence. It has a shortage of follow-through. We know follow-through is possible, because one police officer has already built some of it, on very little.
The call I made in 2021
When Agnes Tirop was found dead at her home in Iten on 13 October 2021, and as the world reeled at the shocking news, I picked up the phone.
She was 25. A month earlier she had run 30:01 for 10km in Herzogenaurach, taking 28 seconds off a women-only world record that had stood since 2002. She had won the world cross country title in 2015 at the age of 19, taken 10,000m bronze at the 2017 and 2019 World Championships, and finished fourth in the 5,000m in Tokyo. The best years of her career were still in front of her.
I called a police contact, and separately Zipporah Nderitu, a senior police officer who has spent years pushing to reform how this country responds to gender violence.
Both told me, in their own way, that progress was being made, but slowly. Zipporah told me about something she was building called Policare: a plan to bring every service a survivor needs under one roof, so that a woman reporting violence would not be shuttled from desk to desk and agency to agency, retelling her worst day to a new stranger each time.
I never followed up on how far it went. Writing this piece is partly me finally doing that.
What she actually built
I am glad I did, because this is one of the few threads in this story that leads somewhere good. Policare is real. It exists.
The National Police Service adopted it as policy in 2021. At the centre in Nanyuki, built for about Sh9 million and serving Laikipia, Samburu, Isiolo and Meru, a survivor can find forensic investigators, health workers, psychosocial support, a representative of the Director of Public Prosecutions and a magistrate on call, inside one building. No being passed from office to office while the trauma is still raw.
There are still only a few of these centres, Makueni and Nanyuki among the earliest, in a country of 47 counties. That gap matters, and I am not going to pretend it away. But Policare is not a press release. It is built, it is staffed, and it is serving people now. The work has been recognised well beyond Kenya: in Auckland in September 2023, Zipporah became the first Kenyan to win the International Association of Women Police award for the prevention of violence against women and children.
If anyone wants to know what actually doing something about this looks like, it looks like her.
Four names, and no verdict
That contrast is the story of the past five years.
Edith Muthoni was killed at Kianjege village in Kirinyaga on 13 October 2021, the same day Agnes was found dead in Iten. She was 27, a Kenya Wildlife Service officer based in Embu who raced over 400m and 800m at regional level. A suspect was arrested within days and police said he would be charged with murder. I have not been able to find any public record of how that case ended.
Damaris Muthee Mutua, Kenyan-born and competing for Bahrain, was found dead in a house in Iten on 19 April 2022. A post-mortem examination gave the cause of death as strangulation. The man police named as their main suspect, an Ethiopian athlete, is reported to have crossed into Ethiopia on 16 April, the day she was killed. Interpol was asked to help find him. He has not been brought back.
Rebecca Cheptegei was Ugandan, but she had bought land in Trans Nzoia to be close to the training groups there, and it was in Kenya that she died. On 1 September 2024 her partner poured petrol over her and set her alight during an argument over that land. She died four days later, with burns to about 80 per cent of her body. He died of his own burns before anyone could call what happened a trial.
And Agnes’s case is still not really a case. Ibrahim Rotich, her estranged husband, was charged with her murder and released on Sh500,000 bail in November 2023. He stopped appearing in court in February 2025, and a warrant was issued for his arrest in March. By September 2025 the hearing had been adjourned for the sixth time and prosecutors were asking the court to proceed without him. He has not been convicted of anything, and on the present record he may never stand trial at all.
Four women. Not one conviction on the public record that I can find. I find that hard to sit with, and I do not think I am meant to find it easy.
The honest case for the state, and where it fails
I do not doubt that people in government care, and the strongest version of their argument is not a weak one.
Kenya has done things. In January 2025 the President gazetted a technical working group on gender-based violence and femicide, chaired by a former Deputy Chief Justice. It consulted across the country and delivered its report. Policare itself became national police policy because the state adopted it, not in spite of the state. None of that is nothing, and it would be unfair to write as though nobody in office has lifted a finger.
But 2026 was the year Kenya told the world it would end gender-based violence altogether. That was the pledge Uhuru Kenyatta carried to the Generation Equality Forum: an end to gender-based violence and female genital mutilation by 2026, funding rising to about US$50 million a year by now, and recovery centres and shelters in all 47 counties.
This is that year. Set against that pledge, the 2025/26 national budget earmarked about Sh304 million for gender-based violence and femicide work: Sh254 million for the main prevention and response programme, and a further Sh50 million that Parliament added for a nationwide campaign against gender-based violence and femicide.
The number that matters is smaller than that. Of the Sh254 million, Sh200 million was expected not from Kenya but from the Government of Finland. The Kenyan state’s own net contribution to its main gender violence programme was Sh54 million. Add Parliament’s Sh50 million and the money Kenya itself put behind the promise comes to about Sh104 million.
Then the external money was written down. In the first supplementary budget the expected Finnish contribution was revised from Sh200 million to Sh20 million, and the programme’s total fell with it, from Sh254 million to Sh74 million. Kenya’s own Sh54 million was left untouched, and it is only fair to say so. That was a write-down of anticipated external funding, not the Treasury raiding its own commitment. Why it was written down is not something the budget documents explain, and I am not going to guess at it.
That is the honest version, and it is still damning. A country that told the world it would spend tens of millions of dollars a year to end gender-based violence by 2026 arrived at 2026 having put up about Sh104 million of its own money, on a programme where four fifths of the original budget was somebody else’s. A promise resting that heavily on another government’s money was never quite a promise.
Of 95 shelters mapped across the country, most of those serving women are running on less than they need. Services are closing rather than opening.
It is hard to feel like the noise is landing when the follow-through so rarely matches the speeches. Zipporah built something real out of very little. I keep wondering what would exist if the state matched her effort, county for county, with the money it keeps announcing and rarely releasing.
I want to keep giving my voice to this, however small it is, in the hope that it counts towards justice.
Tonight I am mourning Martina, and praying that her family finds peace and comfort in this darkest of times. As a father myself, I cannot begin to imagine what her children are going through. My heart goes out to them, and all her loved ones. Rest in eternal peace, Martina.