Like most poor women in African nations, Maasai women are destined to live a life with limited choices.

More than eighty percent of Maasai women will never have a single day of formal education. They will never learn to read or write or speak a language other than their native Maa. Not one in ten will reach the eighth grade. All but the most defiant will be circumcised at the age of twelve or thirteen and soon afterwards married to a man chosen by her father. A Maasai woman will never be allowed to divorce, except in the most egregious cases of physical abuse, and will never be allowed to marry again, even if the husband her father chooses is an old man who dies when she is still in her teens. She will be one of her husband's multiple wives, and will have many children, regardless of her health or ability to provide for them. She will rise early every day to milk cows, and spend her days walking miles to water holes to launder clothes and get water, and to gather wood to carry back home. If she is lucky, she will have a donkey to share her burden. She will live life with few physical comforts, dependent on a husband and a family she did not choose.

One of the poorest tribes in East Africa, the Maasai are a noble and dignified people who, despite the pressures of the modern world, have proudly maintained their traditional lifestyle and cultural identity. They live a nomadic lifestyle raising cattle and goats, wearing traditional clothes, and living in small villages called manyatas, which are circular arrangements of mud huts. In the process of preserving their culture, however, the Maasai have embraced a system where the cultural pressures against women's education are nothing short of overwhelming.

Maasai girls are far less likely than their male counterparts to enroll in school and even fewer will reach the secondary level. When economically feasible, boys are allowed to remain in school, while a vast majority of girls are forced to drop out and marry against their wishes between the ages of 13 and 15.