I AM sitting across a standard conference-room desk listening to the story of Florence Anyango. She is a softly spoken Kenyan woman in her 40s I would say, although I surmise that more from the breadth of her extraordinary and terrible life experience than her appearance. Florence's husband beat her and her children for the entire length of their 24-year marriage. She endured humiliation and abuse few of us can imagine before managing to escape him with the help of Covaw - Coalition on Violence Against Women - an organisation part-funded by Tr�caire, at whose invitation I am visiting various women-focused projects in Kenya.

We meet in a charming colonial building on the outskirts of Nairobi where Covaw's offices are situated. The lush, green suburbs of this city belie the constant threat of violent crime in this, one of the most dangerous places in the world. Kenya has a shocking gap between rich and poor, with the 'haves' living in relative luxury, albeit with 24hour security and 12ft electric fences, and the 'have-nots' living in dire poverty - one in five Nairobians is estimated to live in Kibera, the biggest slum in Africa, where the conditions beggar belief.

Interviewing Florence, however, it is clear that money and class do not protect women against violence. Neither - until very recently in Kenya - did the law. Forty-nine percent of women in this popular safari holiday destination are said to have experienced physical violence. And that's before you consider other basic human-rights abuses. Women constitute 54% of Kenya's voting population but occupy only four percent of its parliamentary seats. Eighty percent of Kenyan agricultural workers are women, yet they own just five percent of the land.

International Women's Day is this week, 8 March. That's when women celebrate their emancipation in various ways throughout the world. But in some places there won't be any celebration. In some regions of Kenya, adult women can be forced to marry without their consent. Through a practice called cleansing, a widow can be 'inherited' by a close relative of her deceased husband or she can be forced to have sex with a social outcast to remove the spirits of her deceased husband. An estimated 38% of Kenyan women between 15 and 49 years old had undergone female genital mutilation (FGM) before the practice was made illegal in 2001 - although, according to the women's groups we spoke to, the ban has had little bearing on this brutal ancient tradition, merely sending the practice underground and making it harder to monitor.

Bringing it all back home Like many African countries, Kenya has been ravaged by the HIV/Aids epidemic and women appear to be the most affected. Men believe that women 'carry' the virus and once a woman is infected she is often abandoned by the man who will move on and infect another woman - leaving her to fend for herself and any children. Another dangerous myth currently circulating is that sex with a virgin can cure Aids. This has precipitated a terrible rise in young girls - and very small children - presenting as victims of rape.

Until very recently, marital rape was not recognised as a crime here. According to UN estimates, 42% of Kenyan women are battered by their husbands or partners. Women back home are beaten too, of course, and as I sit there listening to Florence's story I find myself getting emotional. Not in the usual social-conscience way that I am familiar with, having done these type of trips before, but because I could identify with her story.

I have experienced domestic violence in my family. It was a long time ago but suddenly, without warning, in another continent, in this professional setting, all my old hurt and anger - embarrassingly messy emotions - rose up in me and made me, inappropriately and annoyingly, start to cry. And I realised that, despite my understanding of social conscience, this was my first true point of contact with it. Because it is only when social conscience becomes personal conscience that things really start to happen. For instance, I think it's terrible that so many women in the developing world are being denied their basic human rights. Darfur? Shocking!

But frankly, I'm just so snowed under with my own human rights right now - I just don't know where to start. I've got a job, investments, I'm juggling homework, housework, a second mortgage, I've got a husband to boss about and, on top of it all, can anyone tell me what's going on in fashion right now? There is nothing - nothing - for the big-busted woman in need of tailoring this season.

Like most pampered women in the western world I think having glossy well-cut hair is a human right and consider my inability to live up to the consumer mantra 'because I'm worth it' with monthly facials a kind of martyrdom. I can afford to be blas� about my life because my grandmother and my mother fought centuries of injustice and prejudice to earn my generation the right to be frivolous. We have shown our gratitude by embracing the breast-enhancement/botox culture whilst complaining loudly that men today are 'too nice'.

That is why Africa was such a shock to me.

Because when poverty - spiritual, emotional, physical poverty - comes close enough that you touch it by the hand it stops being about social conscience, and becomes personal. Personal enough that you want to do something about it - that you want to make the pain go away. Which is why the generations of women before us bothered chaining themselves to railings and stood up to the bullying tyrants of a patriarchal society. Because their lives were crap and they didn't want ours to be the same.

And that is what a handful of women - and men - in Kenya are doing too.

Trying hard to smile Agnes Leina is one of them. An astonishingly beautiful Maasai woman, with sculptured cheekbones and a ready smile, she is full of enthusiasm and laughter - despite the nature of her work as programme officer for Covaw. Close to her heart is the problem of FGM and forced marriage among Maasai girls. She is excited to meet someone from Ireland, as she studied here in Kimmage in Dublin. She was interested in hearing about our Travelling community because the Maasai are pastoralists and she can identify with them. She was horrified when I told her what - pathetically little - I knew about their struggle to get halting sites in Ireland, the racism and prejudice they face. Whatever the Kenyan government is doing to the pastoralists with regard to selling off land, they are not trying to get them to 'settle'.

Agnes takes us to a school for girls who have escaped and been rescued from FGM. We crowd into the headmistress's office and undergo the formal introductions which seem to be a tradition here. All meetings begin with each person explaining themselves - like group therapy: "My name's Morag and I'm a writer, " I said a dozen times a day - smiling. I kept on smiling - I smiled at everyone all the time. Partly because I didn't know what to say and partly because what I was thinking was how do you stomach this suffering? Girls being cut to shreds then married off at eight years old. "If they are lucky he will already have a wife who might look after her."

Agnes mimed a gesture of a child being held down. "It is the women who are the custodians of these traditions, " somebody else said. It was gruelling listening and one meeting in which I gave up smiling.

Afterwards we walked around the school and I couldn't meet the children's eyes. I kept thinking about my nine-year-old niece. From there we went to a tiny craft shop owned by Peninah Tombo in Kajiado. She had undergone FGM as a young girl but was rescued from a planned forced, early marriage and was able to stay in school. She eventually married a middleclass Kenyan man (that's a man with a job) and is now selling jewlery made by her old Maasai friends, Elizabeth, Jemima and Grace, to raise money to send girls to school. Very few tribal girls are encouraged towards education - once they are circumcised and married, their schooling stops. Their shop is far from the safari tourist trail and I wonder how they make money at all. Actually, they struggle and are thrilled to see us. We, in turn, are thrilled to shop and spend money. For one hour it is bangles and baubles and smiles all around, but as we drive away I am plunged into depression wondering how they maintain hope with such small gestures weighed against such massive problems.

Tr�caire is highlighting some of these problems this year in its evocative and challenging advertising campaign. The TV ad shows a number of babies who all have one thing in common that could put them at risk of experiencing those problems - the fact that they are girls. The Tr�caire box shows baby Amina from Malawi, whose mother's wish as she sings her to sleep is that her future will be better than hers. That she will have the chance to go to school and won't have to work the fields to survive.

Despair on behalf of other people's problems, though, is unseemly. I see it in the eyes of every Tr�caire staff member but none of them would ever be tacky enough to say it. "I couldn't handle the poverty, " is the reason so many people give for not visiting the developing world on holidays - for going straight from airport coach to hotel compound. The implication that they have an abounding amount of sensitivity. In actual fact, it is not sensitivity but guilt that prevents us from looking.

Those who can look - NGO workers, missionary workers - do so. They certainly have as much sensitivity but perhaps they have less guilt.

Getting it right The next day we learn that things are not all bleak in Kenya. Until very recently the law did not recognise domestic violence as a specific crime.

However, in 2006 a new Sex Act was passed which not only recognises rape as a problem but specifies a minimum sentence of 10 years for rape and life imprisonment for "defilement of a child". It's a wide-reaching law which has the potential to transform the lives of Kenyan women, but it has been a long time coming and is in no small part due to the tireless campaigning of organisations like Covaw and LVCT (Liverpool Voluntary Testing and Counselling), a HIV/Aids NGO that has pioneered rape-crisis centres in Kenyan hospitals.

We are shown around the rape unit at Kenyatta General Hospital in Nairobi by Hadley (mercifully a man! ). The systems they have set up are impressive. A woman or child presenting within 48 hours of being raped will be tested for HIV and given PEP (post-exposure prophylaxis) to reduce the chance of becoming HIV infected. The woman or child will then be given a medical exam to gather necessary legal evidence. There is counselling on hand, as well as a police and legal presence - so it is in effect a one-stop shop for rape victims.

That's the good news. The bad news is that there are a huge amount of them and Kenyatta hospital is pitifully short of resources. The psychiatrist who runs the unit, Dr Ian Kanyanya is working in the oldest part of the hospital without as much as a computer or a proper screen for educational presentations. They are short of chairs in the group counselling room. The spirit is there, the law is behind them - but the resources are falling very, very short. "We have been open since last September but we are afraid to advertise the fact that we are here because we will not be able to handle the influx, " he says.

On our last day we visit the slums of Nakuru where a diminutive Northern Irish nun, Sr Patricia Speight, runs the Love and Hope Foundation, offering counselling and home nursing assistance to people with Aids. It is not genderspecific work - but she assures us that women always come off worse here. The conditions are dire. Open sewers, children dying, prostitution.

The people we met on the programme were charming, intelligent and, above all, grateful.

Willing themselves to live and, in part, with Sr Patricia's help, succeeding. We met women and men alike here - poverty and death are surely the great equalisers.

I came home tired, weepy and with a lot of gratitude of my own. Learning something from the lives of the Kenyans made me more aware that we still have our own battles to fight, our own abused and needy women to champion and protect. But it also made me realise that if I am a global citizen - enjoying the benefits of world travel, buying coffee grown in Kenya, runners in Vietnam, handbags in China - then I hold communal responsibility for their welfare above and beyond my ability to holiday and shop.

But then, that's just theory. Being a sensitive person with a social conscience never saved lives - unless I am willing to do something about it.

Tr�caire's 2007 Lenten campaign promotes equal rights for men and women in the developing world