This extra income would hopefully be ploughed back into the households to improve family health and welfare. One of the project's main strategies was to motivate Maasai women through one-day workshops. A typical workshop programme would comprise lectures, role-playing, drama and discussion. The development motivators would then make follow-up visits to the participants' homesteads. One of the one-day workshops sought to encourage Maasai women to build modern houses.
Traditional houses leak badly during the rainy period, which leads to respiratory infections.
Efforts to introduce the use of polythene paper sheeting on walls and roofs to keep out moisture proved futile, however. Although among the traditional Maasai it is the women who build houses, the community is governed by a male gerontocracy. The male elders are unwilling to let women engage in activities that appear to be departures from their age-old social order. Furthermore, the new type of housing required relatively large monetary investments, which were difficult for the women to raise since Maasai men have ultimate control over family resources. The project strategy, which called for the exclusive use of women as development motivators, therefore had a built-in constraint.