ICT4D Should know ICT is NOT Development

The tech and development community appear not to read from the same script the meaning of ‘development’. As budding entrepreneurs cripple with profitability factors, the social school of thoughts, remains skeptical whether ICT is indeed the vehicle to poverty eradication. I agree with Prof. Geof Walsham’s argument that there is need to distinguish between research on ICT in developing countries and research on ICT for development.

Allow me to look at the most mentioned M-PESA as the yard stick to authenticate Prof. Walsham’s belief. One, is it true M-PESA has helped reduce poverty or it has simply lessened the means of money transfer mechanisms? To try and attempt to respond to this question, let us look at it from two perspectives. First, the inventor of the idea, Safaricom, is making close to Ksh. 20 billion profits annually, but the kiosks owners who operate the business on behalf of the company are simply making about ksh. 2 per transaction made though the company deducts ksh. 30 per transaction. On the same note, for every ksh. 20 scratch sold by Safaricom agent/vendor, you only make Ksh. 1.

The above figures leads us to the question, how much does it cost the company to say send one SMS? According to the figures released by Communications Commission of Kenya, for each SMS sent, the cost is about Ksh. 0.30. Until recently, Safaricom was charging an SMS Ksh. 5 and a call was costing Ksh. 7.

The above simple analysis simply explains why this company is making billions in profits and fools people that it’s actually promoting poverty reduction campaigns. Just to borrow a leaf from one of the papers that was presented to ICT4D London yesterday, some communities are actually selling their goats (assets) to get money to buy airtime which already has inflated prices, is it true ICT is promoting poverty reduction?

In my perspective, I can’t indicate any history where ICT alone has fostered development. But history is clear that ICT inventors have used the invention to amass wealth. To mention but a few, Facebook, Microsoft, Dell corporations inventors are today ranked among the world top billionaires, can we be able to locate anything these names have helped in the poverty alleviation agenda?

To conclude, ICTD should be fused in other disciplines if at all it is to achieve its objective use the vehicle to foster development.

Me and Zach

After an initial denial of Zach’s visa by the British consulate, we were assisted in finally getting both Kenyans admitted. In the end, we think the event was well received we managed to cover a lot of subject matter in a very short time. Douglas and Zach answered most of the audience questions, and had the chance to talk about their community and the issues they faced during the project. They were very well received, as evidenced by the fact that practically the only time we saw them throughout the week was when they shot us exhuberent glances as they talked excitedly with new friends from around the world. Clearly, the scholarship was worth all the trouble Tim Unwin and others put into it.

House was packed in our session at ICTD! Erik Hersman said they wouldn't let him in

We also had Raed Yacoub from Voices Beyond Walls present about their wonderful work in video and mapping with kids in Palestine, and had a lot to share with him about community driven work.

Raed Yacoub presents Voices Beyond Walls

Other panelists we invited couldn’t attend, however, due to the high cost of the conference even just to present at a single panel – they couldn’t afford the fee and neither could we. I was pretty upset about that. This might belie the fact that I’d never attended a proper academic conference before – I’m more experienced with unconferences and the like. In fact, the most interesting part of the conference for me was the contrast (and debates) between academic and practitioner.

The opening session of the conference included a “practitioner panel” with celebs like Erik Hersman from Ushahidi and Ken Banks of Frontline SMS. The message they sent was loud and clear – academics should make a practical impact.

Some sample Tweets during their talk:

“It’s often people who aren’t “qualified” doing experimentation that leads to the best innovation”

“Re: academic – practitioners divide. It’s possible to build methodological bridges. Everyone is a knowledge constructor. Herehere!”

“Ken banks: it’s totally wrong to fly tech implementations around the world – trust local people to work out own implementation”

“We shouldn’t be surprised that tech innovation is coming from Africa says Eric”

“ICT4D research needs to be communicated in language that pracitioners can more readily appreciate”

“I disagree w/those on panel who suggest academics can’t/aren’t doing “real” work in the field, or vice versa”

Browsing the poster sessions and attending many of the paper presentations, I was often struck by the murky in-between area in this particular discipline – many academics were implementing projects, to some extent, while practitioners like ourselves are engaged in research at the same time. And yet, there was a clear difference in purpose and culture. This is still very much an academic field in the making, and many attendees I spoke to were somewhat confused what the outlines were. Were we there to hear companies pitch ideas? Microsoft had funded a huge amount of the featured research. Were we looking for new cool products like a trade fair? There were a number of those on hand, too. Were we discussing thorny issues of international development? Not nearly enough of that for my taste. Were we talking about how technology operates in the world, internet policy, mobile phone usage? This last them came up in many of the papers. But for me, a lot of the discussion left out the primary issues of benefit to the poor and marginalized in favor of interesting graphics and analysis without much follow up.

Although there was a lot of talk in the Tweetosphere about the need to make this more of a Southern conversation, and many attendees were in fact scholarship recipients from the developing world, this perspective seemed sorely lacking from the main events of the conference, even though as Erik and Ken pointed out, a lot of innovation is now coming directly out of the global South etc. There was also a lot of disappointment in the room when Atlanta, GA, USA was announced as host to the next conference because it would mean even more visa troubles getting foreign, poor participants in. This is clearly because it’s academia we’re talking about – and there are still major barriers to most of the world attending – or creating – the kind of elite institution that produce papers accepted for publication. But aren’t we talking about a field that is critically happening NOW in those poorer countries? Do wealthy white people really need to keep talking to each other about it? (Of course – no easy answers here to inclusion problems that plague the development field worldwide).

I was painfully reminded of the frequent divide between benefiting researchers’ thirst for knowledge and benefiting the poor when one researcher presented on mobile phone use in Rwanda. He had acquired amazing amounts of phone data from the dominant phone companies, and mapped out the call patterns showing (predictably, but still kinda cool to see) the rise in calls in a particular region during outbreaks of civil unrest. He had then conducted a study by surveying the people individually in a sample study, because he still didn’t know who was calling who – some privacy did remain. Now, fine, but a comment he made really bothered me: no one EVER refused to answer his questions. His take: “Now I would NEVER answer some of these personal questions on my income, and who was the last person I called and why! But these friendly Rwandans always replied!” The person sitting next to me and I exchanged glances – was this supposed to be a good thing? WHY did every Rwandan reply with personal information to a stranger calling their phone? WHY is it so easy to do extractive research in most developing country settings? Could there be an ethical issue at stake? Has anyone bothered to consider the politics or social issues behind surveying people who are rather at a power disadvantage to you, without offering anything in exchange? And what exactly was the research supposed to lead to – what was its practical purpose – to lead to more publications and better careers for foreigners? Maybe there was more to it, but this wasn’t discussed during the presentation. Perhaps this begs the somewhat existential question, does knowledge for knowledge’s sake make sense when we’re talking about the poor and disadvantaged?

I’ve thought a lot about this during our work in Kibera, a hotbed of academic research. Most people we would meet walking around would ask, are you a student or a researcher (the 2 options)? I would say that optimistically, at least 50% of the time the research does not make it back to the people, much less have an impact on their lives in the long run. Even just enlightening the general public as to research outcomes would be something. It’s much like when documentary filmmakers (like the ones who made Good Fortune) film in Kibera and then produce movies about critical local issues that can’t even be viewed legally online in Kenya.

Having said that – there is clearly a lot of desire among conference participants to bridge the gap between these rather artificially separate disciplines. I hope that this moves forward between now and ICTD 2012.

This post is part of a series exploring the ideas and issues that have emerged in our research project with Institute of Development Studies, supported by DFID. All posts from the Map Kibera team, the researchers from IDS, our trainers and colleagues are collected here. As always, we are eager to discuss this work, so we hope to hear your comments.

For the Map Kibera youth themselves, having enough money to simply survive (and often help family members survive) is the concern in the background of most of their lives and decisions (see this video by some members of KNN on the subject). It’s completely understandable that despite our efforts to convey a kind of collaborative DIY camaraderie in this project – ie, that we were bringing skills to share but were not “parents”, “employers”, or “matatu drivers” (see below), they still saw us as the white rich outsiders bringing opportunities and jobs. This is simply the mold we appeared to fit, and no matter what we said, it continued to be their impression. We stressed we were only bringing training not hiring them for a job. But they wanted a job! And they knew someone who “volunteered” with, xyz organization and received money for “transport and airtime” amounting to 3 or 4 times what one could possibly spend locally on that expense. (Over time, we found out that this was the norm in part because paying people became much more complicated legally and fiscally than giving out airtime vouchers – a distortion caused by donors suspicious of direct payment.)

So, the bigger issue of payment persisted with our own group. The mappers, videographers, SMS reporters, everyone wanted and wants to be paid. This makes sense, of course – they hope to and need to create a viable livelihood, but the idea that you can jump over the part where you actually learn the skill and go straight into a job market is based on experience with NGOs. We did pay participants a small amount particularly during the intensive mapping phase, (which we debated about endlessly with everyone we talked to in Kibera). We also helped create an organization, but it’s not for us – we’re not the employers and they’re not the employees of the organization – we’re merely assisting in a co-creation of a structure so they can carry forth and solicit donations and paid projects and take on expansion themselves. Or so we thought, incorrectly as it turns out. You see, Kenyans can be, well, rather indirect in such matters, if I may make a generalization.

This misunderstanding came to a head during our research with the Institute of Development Studies and focus groups with Sammy Musyoki brought out the fact that our group saw us in a particular, quite non-equal-opportunity way. Of course, we had discussed many times with everyone how the Trust was going to go – they all nodded ferociously at the end of casual conversations with KNN or the mappers, all of us crammed in to the tiny room in the KCODA offices, several to a chair, desk or bench, in which we all agreed about various roles and responsibilities. These meetings were often peppered with Mikel or I saying things like, “what do you think, guys, how do you want things to look?” or “we’ve never done this before either so we all have to work together, we don’t have all the answers.” In other words, I don’t want you getting the impression that we came in all teacherly and managerial and sat in front of the room or even had handouts or agendas or the various trappings of Western corporate bureaucracy, though to be sure at some point we began suggesting that the guys do things like write agendas and take minutes. Our approach with them was in no small way aimed at being, well, participatory. This open-ended stuff, we found, not only didn’t work but met with blank stares (what do you mean you don’t have everything worked out ahead of time!). Some of the reason for this came out in our Training of Trainers sessions with Aptivate, when they guys discussed their own learning experiences, which included being beaten by teachers with various implements for failing to understand math (and then being beaten with hockey sticks by rival sports teams). The British System here reminds me of my parents’ stories of Catholic school in the US in the 1940s.

During the discussions with Sammy, a Kenyan himself and skilled facilitator, the guys came out with various metaphors for our relationship with them – including employer/employee, parent/child, and even, matatu (bus) driver/passengers. They also envisioned us both as drivers who had left the bus stranded, and parents who didn’t apportion cake evenly to their children. It seemed our words on both money and leadership had never really hit home. At one point Sammy said, well, the matatu is valuable so if you don’t get in and drive it someone else will! Here’s your chance, in other words.

To make matters worse, getting small short-term jobs with NGOs often involves tasks that look somewhat like what we do – say, one can be hired as a “volunteer” survey-taker or “volunteer” going around talking to people about health, etc. Even attending training courses is often a paid activity – some organizations, for instance, pay participants so that they can afford to attend in lieu of whatever odd jobs and “hustling” (as the guys would say) that they might otherwise engage in. During our meetings, for instance at KNN, we would usually give attendees enough for lunch (literally about $1) which was still enough to have to later have to intentionally kick out the “lunchers” – those who never did anything but show up that one hour for lunch. More than any other group of people in a developing country or poor place that I’ve encountered, Kiberans are wise to the fact that without them, there is no GBV prevention, there is no health survey, there is no NGO. This may seem like convoluted logic, because obviously these programs are created to address needs in Kibera! But the fact is, I would also be a bit suspicious too, asking what’s in this for me, if I saw the likes of Melinda Gates, the president of the Nike foundation, and the executive director of Unicef visit me in Kibera within the span of a few months (Gates and Nike in the same week!) – evidence of huge numbers of donor dollars and international attention – and yet my own pockets were so empty that a mere toothache proved to be a debilitating ailment.

What’s the solution? I must honestly confess that when it comes to Kibera economics, I can’t fully answer that. I know, it’s a cop-out. The aid industry has somehow created an economy out of false promises and castles in the air, and now everyone’s discovered the world is a much more complicated place than they ever imagined and they can’t fix it in the way they once thought (though perhaps technology is the current candidate for silver-bullet). It’s true that the handout-dependency problem is alive and well, perhaps at its healthiest in Kibera. It’s also true that we do-gooders bear much of the burden for this. But it’s not true that we can’t expect something different, or act different ourselves.

By the end of our reckoning with Sammy and the Map Kiberans, which we later referred to as “group therapy”, we did have some ideas for what we can all do differently. For one, having skilled cultural mediators is critical – we had started with several, but unfortunately they had not held the rare set of qualities which really allows one to dance between several cultures and keep their own agenda in check all the while. The entire group of youth decided to take on driving the matatu, and the differences between them (and even us) seemed to dissolve in the relief at having gotten some of the hidden issues into daylight. I realized that one thing they craved was this kind of motivating  joy of unity – we had a bit of a Map Kibera tent revival meeting. I thought that responsibility for the project was also shared more appropriately and the central reason for doing the project was centered back onto its social merit rather than personal profitability.

So, we have committed ourselves for the time being with slogging through the difficult process of working with our team of some 30 youth in three programs in Map Kibera Trust to turn the standard model around. Part of that means, everyone has to demonstrate commitment and draw up requirements for their own participation, be part of the budgeting and strategic planning for their own program and then create criteria for who receives money when and for what (whether it’s called stipend, lunch, transport, or salary). We want this to be a youth-led organization, in the long run. Our work in Mathare is structured differently, and we think this will help though it’s still early days. There are in fact several good role models, and a lot of people who’ve worked through all this before. We’ve spent a good deal of time clarifying the vision of the work and our role, and we’re now committed to a long-term capacity building and organizational development process in Kibera. Our group is still alternately frustratingly passive and expecting handouts, and so generous, creative, dedicated, and organized that they inspire me to keep doing everything I can to support them. The key is often to commit to the process, and know that at the heart of success will be inspiring some balance between self-interest and seeing the opportunities for selfless contribution to society. But isn’t that, in fact, the same balance we all strive – and sometimes fail – to achieve?

This post is part of a series exploring the ideas and issues that have emerged in our research project with Institute of Development Studies, supported by DFID. All posts from the Map Kibera team, the researchers from IDS, our trainers and colleagues are collected here. As always, we are eager to discuss this work, so we hope to hear your comments.

That is to say, there are no simple volunteer projects in Kibera. At least, none founded by outsiders.

This has been an evolving thread through our work and has upended some of our original thinking on open-source or simply, development projects. You might say we were merely naive. Why on earth would anyone living in dirt-poor conditions want to “volunteer” just for the good of their community? Have you met a lot of jobless people in America or Europe who can barely feed their children, wear threadbare clothes and shoes, and have to pay to use a dirty latrine piping up to volunteer on raising awareness on HIV?

It’s an unfair comparison, I know. The fact of the matter is that in the slums one might volunteer to clean up the latrines or build a new one, simply because no one else is going to do it for them. And someone with HIV or whose family members are affected might well wish to spread the word about prevention. And certainly there are many, many true volunteers – they just tend to be starting things themselves from within Kibera, and hoping things will turn around soon.

We hoped that the value of the trainings we were offering would be in and of themselves enough. We also hoped that motivation would come from a desire to improve Kibera, the kind of community motivation that would be a matter of pride and would perhaps stem from a sense of the systemic injustice represented by a slum. Personally, I probably had thoughts of working in Latin America, where indigenous communities have often self-organized and pushed very hard on social justice issues, where poverty itself is seen as a justice and human rights issue, and there is a long legacy of social thought and philosophy underpinning most community-based organizations.

What we found, instead, is a community so influenced economically by years of “interventions” by various international development organizations that a full shadow economy has developed. It’s not the black market – it’s the shadow aid market. Ask any Kibera resident about jobs they’ve held in the past and most will mention some volunteering with aid agencies or small NGOs in the community. And by “volunteering” they mean getting paid to do a job. It’s evidence of the perversion of donor dollar influx that the very term Volunteer connotes something completely different here than it does anywhere else. What has happened is that well-meaning organizations have set up projects in Kibera (thousands of them) and thereby actually created a “market” for participants in those programs. There are so many NGOs here that the demand is actually for Kiberans to take part, rather than the other way around. Of course, we felt that our project was different, and perhaps it is – a kind of meta-project created to make public all of the information that these hundreds of organizations were collecting, to allow direct self-mediation (non-mediation?) of information, news and stories, to hopefully drill a hole through the cacaphony of aid-speak about Kibera and allow a few actual people to speak through and tell the truth.

This was – and still is – our vision. But the economic conundrum remains. Kibera residents have learned that these NGOs need them – that they’re getting paid and raising a great deal of funds in order to develop programs and fill their presentations, events, workshops, and trainings with bodies. Kiberans have wised up to the fact that sometimes they’re being “sold” by agencies to donors even if the project hasn’t really made them better off – after all, who asked them? – and there have even been a few oft-repeated tales of random small children being photographed in Kibera with a white person who then used the photos to raise funds for their own pocket. (Of course, this is why we’re trying to create platforms of transparency – ways for people to disclose what’s happening in the community and expose the gaps). Kiberans whisper about ending up on billboards in America without a penny to show for it. Whether true or not – it’s probably happened, and then rumor made it sound like the norm – this shows the distrust that has developed under the welcoming Kibera surface. We’ve had arguments with participants to convince them that no, most white people don’t come to Kibera to get rich! This also explains why tourists shouldn’t simply wander through with their big cameras and photograph people, as they so often do. It hints at a much deeper recognition of the complicated, often contradictory relationship between the thousands of well-meaning white people who find their way to Kibera and those who live there every day, and the lack of any meaningful way for Kiberans to guide those relationships – coupled with their frequent dependency on them. There is an unwillingness to challenge openly a system that might one day prove to supply one of the few real jobs that are at hand – the coveted NGO position. (For me, this was frustrating since we set out to co-develop a project not fill it with employees – see part 2).

Eventually, there emerged an expectation of a “sitting fee” to attend someone’s meeting – yes, organizations paying people just to fill the seats in their events. This complicated our initial attempts to hold community meetings around the issue-based maps. The first one was organized by Regynnah, a mapper, on the topic of health. It was held in Raila, her own village. There were a good 30 people and it was a great success. However, we only gave out sodas to participants, no money or phone airtime. Regynnah came to us afterward and said now her contacts were mad at her because they expected to be paid for this 1-2 hour discussion of health – even though most of them were health practitioners and ostensibly interested in the topic. We hoped instead they’d be able to make use of the information – not demand a sitting fee.

We tackled this by making sure people knew in advance that no one would be paid for such discussions – meaning they might attract fewer people, but ones who are more intrinsically motivated to participate – and in fact, sometimes only 4 or 5 people showed up.

It was a challenge to us as well. We had to make these activities really worth their while, and create a working relationship based on trust that could lead to improvements in the sector in question. A lot more thinking went in to producing projects that would really engage communities and be driven by them as well as for them. We continue to unravel the idea of how to support people to share information in such a way that it changes the status quo in Kibera – how to complete the feedback loop and help people use technology to achieve their goals. The shadow economy, though, pulls people in different directions and in some cases fosters splintering of organizations and groups.

I do believe strongly that there needs to be a more equal exchange between any outsider and the Kibera people. This has informed a lot of our work trying to consolidate information in an open system rather than constantly requesting Kibera residents to answer surveys and participate in focus groups that will never have visible benefits to them (much less reports back on the findings). I’ve been appalled by many NGOs’ and  researchers’ total disregard for the worth of each person’s time and energy – perhaps a sitting fee should apply when research is done in this traditional, extractive way. One problem is that too often Kiberans profess excitement over any new project and pin their livelihood (and other) hopes on it, encouraging absolutely everyone that whatever hair-brained idea they came to Kibera is the greatest thing since sliced bread. Not to say this happened to us

More on livelihoods and working with our Trust team in Part 2…

This post is part of a series exploring the ideas and issues that have emerged in our research project with Institute of Development Studies, supported by DFID. All posts from the Map Kibera team, the researchers from IDS, our trainers and colleagues are collected here. As always, we are eager to discuss this work, so we hope to hear your comments.

It was a Saturday morning, and light filtered through the window curtains illuminating people sitting on a couch, chairs, some perched on the countertop all roughly circling a table in the middle of the room.

On my first meeting with the Kibera News Network (KNN) journalists I asked the young reporters crowded into the workspace near Chief’s Camp to answer three questions:
What do you want to learn during the workshops?
What is a story you have worked on that you found exceptionally challenging or one you are very proud of?
Why are you a journalist?

This was a pre-meeting before I began Saturday reporting workshops for the month of November. The journalists had previous training on videography and filming, but wanted more training on specific reporting skills. Trying to ascertain what I could offer in a classroom environment and the level of journalism experience in the room, after introducing myself, I asked the above three questions and we all listened and discussed what was said for rest of the morning.

QUESTION 1
What do you want to learn during the workshops?

Reporting training topics broached included journalism professionalism, finding story ideas, effectively using voice for VO (voice-overs), TV stand-ups, and interviewing techniques, to name a few. More than enough content to go beyond our originally planned four weeks together! After I asked about story structure, types of news stories, and media law a plan materialized of the direction our sessions would take.

QUESTION 2
What is a story you have worked on that you found exceptionally challenging or one you are very proud of?

Stories about covering events for HIV/AIDS, road infrastructure, and mud slides involving death in the community. The typical challenges of being a reporter, compounded by the role of KNN as a group of Kiberan journalists and residents reporting stories the mainstream media does not.

QUESTION 3
Why are you a journalist?

The answers to Question 3 spoke to the young journalist in me who ventured to J-school after high school not knowing what to expect.

Individuals talked about business opportunities and career potential by having a marketable skill set. However, threaded throughout the business prospects a collective passion for the craft was individually voiced. That through journalism, through story-telling, a community documents and displays its realities with the potential to grow and develop.

Several of the journalists seated in the room with me said they practiced journalism because of its capacity to facilitate change. And they want to be instrumental in creating positive change in Kibera.

You can’t teach that.

The Saturdays in November sped by with workshops covering journalism professionalism, the elements of news, interviewing, media law and ethics, story ideas and story structure. It was a pleasure to work with and discuss journalism techniques and expectations with the group. Utilizing the skills, ideas, and passions within the group, I am excited to see what stories will be produced next, continue working with the team, and follow how the Kibera News Network develops in 2011.

Also fresh off the press is an article I wrote on the early stages of Map Kibera called “Putting Nairobi’s Slums on the Map“, in the World Bank’s Development Outreach magazine.

It’s been about three months since we started working with 17 Kibera youth on the Kibera News Network (KNN) – an online “TV channel” for local stories and news about Kibera. They had no video experience and very little computer experience, and faced daunting challenges like lack of internet access, frequent power failures, slow computers, rampant viruses, and poor software – not to mention being nearly attacked for attempting to record subjects like a woman being beaten and looters on an overturned train. But they’ve now uploaded more than 20 short videos up on KNN’s Youtube channel, using Flip cameras and other supplies donated by UNICEF and computers at KCODA, and the new community journalists are posting more every week (or rather – giving them to me to upload, as we all wait for hallowed arrival of Safaricom wimax).

The purpose of KNN is to provide a means for Kiberans (mostly youth) to become citizen reporters of their community – sharing stories using Flip cameras and posting them online. The stories are also mapped on Voice of Kibera, and contribute to our broader goal of empowering communities to share and generate their own information. The news they report isn’t usually covered by other sources, so it’s a valuable community resource. It’s not meant necessarily to professionalize them as reporters, but to engage as many youth as possible in engaging with their community in this way – though those who enjoy it could certainly pursue journalism or videography careers.

Recently, we’ve been working on some important topics. One team reported on the recent slum upgrading in Soweto East; another on electricity disconnections. Riots have been covered alongside events promoting the draft constitution and a visit by Arsenal football coaches. A recent video on male circumcision has touched on a controversial topic and attracted a lot of views .

Jemimah, KNN reporter

I’ve watched the group evolve over the past few months. We started with five teams of 3 or 4, meeting once a week. Some of them asked if they could come every day to learn as much as they could. Luckily, the KNN leaders – two young Kiberans who are already skilled in filmmaking – were happy to hang out at the KCODA office, making use of the computers and help the students edit their pieces. Steve and Jahdi are also learning how to lead and support their peers.

Rather than following a traditional training model, it’s more like a youth group – peer education and management. This sometimes means that things get a bit messy. We lock our cameras and have one of the KCODA staff, also a KNN member, sign them in and out. Any lapse in procedure can be a big problem – we had a scare when one Flip cam went missing for about a week and then “mysteriously” reappeared after prolonged debate in our weekly meeting. In order to prevent such things, I think that a sense of group identity and ownership – this is our place, these are our resources – is key. This is already happening – within each team they are keen to weed out those who aren’t “serious” and find new recruits themselves. So the group has become self-regenerating. The 17 or so we have now are not all from the original group – we’ve had to do introduction sessions for new students.

Jacob demonstrates

One of the most striking things about the project is that so far it’s purely voluntary, including the trainers – except for lunch on meeting day. If you know Kibera, you know that very few people do anything for free, unless it’s really important to them. The group has pushed me to spend far more time on this than I anticipated, keeping up with demand for new skills and managing this growth spurt. They do get access to the computers and cameras and training, and I think the skill building is clearly a benefit. However, in the long run, we’ll have to think more about how to help them to raise their own funds for the project. There are luckily some opportunities locally, like A24, to market clips and videos, so I think they have a chance. But I’ll have to write a whole separate post to cover the topic of paid vs. unpaid community journalism. As with OSM mapping, citizen reporting is different when you’re not wealthy. I’m just hoping to create chances for those youth with something to say, to have a chance to say it.

Working on the site at KCODA

They think it’s exciting to see their work online, but are also interested in making sure the rest of Kibera also gets to see it. On July 17^th, they’ll have a local debut – showing a few clips at the start of a documentary someone else is bringing to Kibera. In the midst of all this, we’ve managed to recruit some great volunteers in both tech and journalism (though we’re still looking for a longer-term intern!).

Now, I’m interested to see how the introduction of the internet at KCODA will impact KNN. KCODA is in process of installing full-fledged computer lab, and they already let KNN use 2 computers full time. The students will be able to upload themselves, and thereby become more like the  citizen reporters we’re now used to in the US. But their relationship with the internet is different – it’s not something second-nature and constantly at their fingertips, it’s a prized commodity and valuable resource. We’ll see how things evolve once this resource is more accessible.

The conference was meant to last only two days, but due to a certain volcanic ash cloud, the informal after-conference lasted up to a week for some. In fact, I’m not even sure if everyone is home yet. Getting to know your colleagues off-Twitter from a variety of sectors is invaluable, and this crowd wasn’t made up of the usual conference-goers since 30 of the project leaders (including us) had won an online contest in order to be chosen. In fact, due to an abundance of strictly timed elevator-style presentations, much of the conference felt like cross between American Idol and an industry trade show, with everyone hawking their newest invention to age-old problems. Even when some of them seemed to fall apart upon closer inspection, I was impressed by the spirit of invention  – dare I say, a DIY mentality? (Innovation is a nice word, but why not invention? The inventor conjures a half-mad genius in the lab, an Einstein, an Edison, who, fueled by the mad drive to create, finally produces a light bulb). Many of the attendees had obviously come with the hope of convincing the judges (er…World Bank) to finance their experiments. It was a long shot.

I had a moment of recognition that this is the best place to be in what has become the mega-industrial aid and development complex. I’d rather be around 30 creative inventors pitching their ideas with vigor (even if 29 of them never succeed) than 3000 executives at the next Global Conference on a Big Issue. It is those who take a chance on an idea and run with it who command my greatest respect. This is not coincidentally thanks to my experience of the difficulty of actually bringing an idea to fruition! That would be my only caviat: ideas are great, but talk to me after you have actually tried it out with real people.

So – here are just a few of the cool things I learned of, with great people to match (there were others I wanted to include BUT could not find online – if your project doesn’t even have a basic website how can it inspire others around the world? And if it’s not public, even worse.):

-       Reconstructed Living Labs: – Using social media to reform lives; plus they use MXit to do counseling and they all blog on their phones. They’re highlighted in this video: (otherwise: warning, very cheesy conference video).

-       Hibr: - Lebanese youth newspaper and online independent citizen media. They also want to create a traveling media lab out of an old bus.

-       Armed Conflict and Location Event Dataset: Mapping armed conflict, including ground research to determine who is doing what.

-       Voices Beyond Walls – Palestinian youth media and mapping project.

-       Voices of Africa: Nairobi-based project of solar-powered rural internet kiosks.

-      UNDP Threat and Risk Mapping: Makes use of participatory mapping to determine local needs, and plan for village development in Sudan. Not sure if this is shared, public information though.

I had started out the day rushing around trying to accomplish things without success: getting my computer repaired, exchanging my new USB plug-in modem for one that works. These tasks had also failed, and now, watching the rain pour down harder and harder onto the mud streets of Kibera, I had to just give up. And wait.

I often think that in Nairobi, things work just well enough to make it frustrating. You expect the power to stay on, you expect the computers to function, you think your new Orange modem will work with your Mac. Everything functions at breakneck speed, until we’re reminded (much like the lesson of the Icelandic volcano ash, I think) that it all really hangs on a thread and nature, bureaucracy, fate, malice, just plain traffic jam can pull it down at any moment. In fact, the Friday afternoon traffic jam today was standstill, given the rain.

After a nice chat with the guys at KCODA the rain finally eased up, and I left – frustrated, but not for long. Check out this insanely beautiful rainbow I was then treated to, while sitting in a dirty matatu listening to the driver’s reggae mix:

Oddly, no one else seemed to be looking at it. But what wonders a natural wonder can do for you after a week of struggling with community technology.

Last week, we began training 16 enthusiastic youth on Flip cameras. We haven’t quite got the internet installed at KCODA for the uploading, so we’re not quite online yet. But I can’t wait. Just see below all the amazing stories that the teams are planning to report on. They have already started and I’ve seen some great footage! THESE are some of the stories that are hidden inside the slums waiting to be told. Notice that most groups categorized stories into themes (and some only had themes, so we will work on that).

Group 1:
Collins, Moha, Steve

1) Noise pollution: the noise rules are not followed; during day it is very noisy due to business activities like CD shops.
2) Olympic bus terminus: the bus turn about was repaired but it not used (waste of municipal funds?)
3) Need for bumps along chief’s camp road: speeding vehicles are dangerous to school children
4) Dangers of living along the railway lines: possibility that train will fall on them, endangering their lives
5) Grabbing of land meant for pavements and paths: no room for pedestrians due to building out into slum road
6) Youths and illegal gangs in Olympic – repairing your structure often requires bribe payment to them
7) Interference of power transformers by residents: those who live in kibera often replace the fuses themselves: this causes fire to houses such as that last week of several homes
8. Insecurity: Bars operate till very late, so they can harbor criminals
9) Presence of local artists who promote peace: like solo 7 and maasai 2

Group 2:
Regynnah, George, Eddie

1) Talents: profiles of especially talented youth: youths playing football, singing, other
2) Security: adopt-a-light program and how it has helped security since lights are now available in some areas, also chief’s place improvements that improved security
3) Education: in Kibera there are some very good schools like Olympic that is top in country, and Soweto academy: profiling top schools in slums
4) Unity: in case of fire outbreak, people unite to help each other and don’t wait for fire truck – team firefighting in kibera
5) Love: people don’t allow each other to go hungry, neighbor will give food if someone needs it
6) Informed: we as youths of kibera are well informed about our rights, not ignorant
7) Fighting poor sanitation: there is a cleanup process where youth gather together and clean the villages themselves
8. Fighting poverty: many people are self-employed, own their own kiosks and do not work for others
9) Self-reliant: Those in Kibera do shopping in Kibera, not Nakumatt – one can just get the same items cheaper here and that way the money stays local to Kibera

Group 3:
Mildred, Jacob, Shadrack, Sizzah

1) Sanitation: community health and garbage collection
2) Education: outsiders think Kiberans are not literate and educated; showing that is not true
3) Development: community initiatives that are trying to improve Kibera
4) Recollection: sports and events, community activities and talents, fun
5) Lifestyle: poverty – people are sometimes wealthy but staying here anyway – inside their mud houses you find nice things they have bought.
6) Housing and land
7) Human Rights
8. Intercultural and Religious: People intermarrying among tribes. Others think they cannot stay together due to election violence. Is this a problem since 2008?
9) Disease
10) Skills, Knowledge: one man built a vehicle for himself in Kibera using scrap metal alone – profile of entrepreneurship

Group 4:
Isabella, Wilfred, Hassan

1) Biogas projects coverage
2) Youth group activities documentation
3) Sanitation – water taps and toilets
4) farming produce in sacks – new method for business and fighting hunger
5) poultry farming – can get financially stable by chicken farming in Kibera
6) lobbying and advocacy
7) kazi kwa vijana: jobs for youth program follow up – is it working? have youth found jobs?
8. security
9) expansion of roads and impact that is having – some people are being pushed out
10) hospitals establishment: residents use local clinics not Kenyatta hospital – plenty of local health services now

Group 5:
Cliffton, Douglas, Lucy

1) Sanitation: UN toilet compared to CDF funded: comparison of quality
2) Education: informal vs formal schools – quality comparison
3) Health: how people approach public health and facilities
4) Transport infrastructure: looking at roads inlets and outlets
5) Business: kinds of businesses that exist here, commodities produced.
6) Drainage system: sewage disruption in gutters caused by blockages leading to home flooding, yet sewer lines run right under kibera without servicing it.
7) Housing: slum upgrading project and how are initial structures looking
8. Public health: Food kiosks: whether environment is sanitary at these kiosks
9) Water: toilets built along water channels, drainage creates disease
10) Tribes: enclaves: conflicts because people are now living in different areas not mixed. each village is enclave. how this happened, makes it easy for attacks on tribes since you know who is who.
11) Land issue: no one has title deeds which causes major problems