The small village of Wongonyi is located in the Taita hills not far from the coast, nestled among lush hilltops with views over the massive Tsavo game parks. Mikel and I had the good fortune to spend a recent escape-from-Nairobi weekend there. Our friend Primoz who sent us was a minor celebrity up in these parts for having actually walked and mapped the whole village, which is spread over several very steep hilltops.
Wongonyi views
The entire constituency of Mwatate, in fact, has been on our radar for a while; we visited local authorities with SODNET last year, and they were very interested in getting community feedback through mapping or other technology. We made plans to come up and do some training. But Wongonyi is literally off the grid. To what extent can technology make a difference, or even make sense, to the small-scale farmers living up here? Places like this always inspire me, and challenge me to question everything we consider to be “development.”
Just around the corner, but a million miles away
To get to Wongonyi, you must brave a matatu ride from the town of Voi up a steep, deeply rutted dirt road, for 250 shillings ($3 in a dollar or two per day economy), or for twice that amount you might get a seat in the four-wheel-drive truck. This is a road built where nature never intended. Following partly along the course of a dried riverbed, it hugs the mountainside improbably and forces a speed of about 2km/hr. At 7:30 each morning, the matatu pitches and heaves back down carrying some 20 people in seats meant for 14, along with several gallons of fresh milk in empty plastic vegetable oil containers to sell in Voi. Mama Ruth, our adopted mom on the mountain, tells us that improvements have been made: now we have 2 matatus and the truck, when we used to have just one matatu. She says it as though she owns them, and in a way, the vehicles do belong to the whole town – even she, who could afford a car, wouldn’t bring it up the mountain, where it might melt into the earth during a hard rain. It simply doesn’t make sense to own a vehicle that isn’t being used constantly and by everyone.
Mama Ruth and Kathy Wood
The road has actually been paved in concrete in some particularly unwieldy passages, rendering it passable on most days. Progress, we think. This must help the residents. Not really – matatu prices have not decreased for villagers, and the only change they’ve seen is that big logging trucks can now make it up the paths into pristine forest, and bring the goods back down. In fact, the local chief started to tell people not to cut their trees because a place like Wongonyi depends heavily on sustaining a delicate environmental balance. The shangas, or small household farms, are built on terraced mountainsides next to trees that hold the slippery earth in place. Most of the trees have been planted, after an initial shaving of the hillsides many years ago. A virgin forest – more of a jungle – tops the mountain, also preserved in order to prevent devastating erosion and to protect the watershed. When milk prices fall for these subsistence farmers, they are understandably tempted to cut the trees on their property for some 50 shillings (though the middlemen can make several times that in profit) and the chief must intervene.
Village to Village
Sarah and William
We happened to be in Wongonyi at the same time as a family of four Canadians, the Woods. Hailing from a small town in northern Ontario, they had turned fundraising for Wongonyi into a family passion and this time brought 600 kilos of donated items (baby clothes, dress patterns, solar lamps). We watched them unveil a sunflower seed-press for a women’s group, bought from Kickstart in Nairobi. The Woods had also begun to construct a playground at the elementary school, donated baby clothes at the clinic, brought sewing patterns and fabric for a seamstress training project, and were paying scholarships for a few girls to finish high school and college. We had several interesting discussions with them as they debated what would make the most impact and not go to waste, and tried to convince people they were just small-town average folk like themselves. Ronnie Mdawida, a local resident, had been their exchange student in Canada inspiring the founding of their Ronnie Fund. Ronnie is also the reason we are there in Wongonyi thinking about how we can possibly lend our own skills. After founding Kosmos Solutions with an American friend, Ronnie and his wife Sarah have been working hard to improve the village. Challenges here abound: alcoholism and absentee drunkard fathers are common, girls go to school only until their parents decide they’re much more useful collecting firewood and managing the household – usually before the age of 12. There is no electricity, minimal running water, and few medicines at the clinic. The death of a parent can leave 8 children fending for themselves off the food raised by farming on steep terraces, and funerals are frequent due to lack of medical care. HIV has made its way up from the towns. But there is an abundance of less tangible goods: extended family usually lives just down the path, and neighbors support each other in times of need. The stars at night come out suddenly in bright abundance, just after the pink sunset fades over the plains below. Food is cooked in large batches and shared with friends and family. Folks will walk half the day to attend the funeral of someone they were barely acquainted with, bringing small coins or food. They are buried in their own backyards. And the land is incredibly fertile. Taita was largely spared from the drought that recently plagued much of Kenya. Several springs and rivers run down the mountain and provide natural irrigation. From my perspective, too, arriving in Wongonyi was like coming home to a family I never knew I had. Everyone we passed said a bright hello (or, rather, habari yako) and wanted to know what we were doing, maybe have a chat. I also felt the urge to say hello and learn about every person, releasing my cautious and guarded Nairobi attitude.
Mapping and Media in Mwatate
So – what is it we’re planning in this hamlet? Primoz, as mentioned, has already mapped the village. Our partners at SODNET want to extend that to the whole constituency. We want to do some training as we’ve done in Nairobi, with young people who want to map their own villages, and think of other ways that the rural community can hold information locally for policy impact and self-advocacy. With a receptive MP this can be very effective; he complained to us that he simply doesn’t have enough basic facts on the area’s needs. Collecting, sharing, talking, and thinking about community needs might mean starting mobile phone radio or storytelling with the local girls’ club. I think it’s really important not to plan too much from the outside (Nairobi), but to come with ideas and allow the process to develop organically. Certainly, that’s what has worked in Kibera. I’m ready for this process to be much slower than it’s been in Nairobi. Everything is slower in Wongonyi. I certainly don’t mind. Walking and then talking face-to-face is still the primary communication method, although mobile towers allow for decent coverage. Everything is done on a personal level: small projects come and go, each meant to provide income: butterfly farming, biogas collection, etc. What might happen if some of the girls in the girls’ club had the experience of creating short videos or audio recordings about their lives, or about anything at all. Would it be a confidence-builder, could they even participate in the village planning process this way with pride in their special knowledge of a technology that others don’t know? That’s been a boost to our current group, made them feel smart and proud. Or is that simply going too far: after all, the girls in the club lead what we’re told is a tough life of household work, farming, and school, and leaving their chores for even one hour a week can be a tough sell to parents.
Are we the teachers, or the students?
Mikel and I left Wongonyi feeling inspired yet challenged: him pondering the difficulties of life so cut off from anything outside or “modern”, me bemoaning the fact that the world we usually inhabit has lost the communal aspect of life and regard for nature that is simply required for survival in such an environment. Each other human is worthy of time and respect, and is valued if only because of being few humans so dependent on each other. But aren’t we all, in fact, dependent in this way – only we’re able to pretend otherwise? Aren’t we also at nature’s mercy for survival, only we offhandedly destroy it daily? It might be romanticism, but seeing only the poverty and dire challenges confronting these villages is also nearsighted, though that is the typical language found (abject poverty, desperation, disease, hunger). It’s the same language used to characterize Kibera, the image that can hurt more than help. Blanket characterization of any way of life as either piteous or righteous is far too facile. I only hope that our contributions to Wongonyi and Mwatate can help them to plan and advocate for what they want, and as always, to know that their knowledge and views are important and should be shared. If we ever hope to find balance on this planet, it’s their stories even more than ours that needs to be heard. Whose reality counts? Can we offer something useful – whether technology or simply the knowledge that they now count, they are visible, they have this map, or these stories, and they can slowly impact the course of life in Mwatate? It is in such small-scale development work where we encounter what I consider to be the central dilemma of the issue at hand. Here we are, from the outside, doing something we think will “help” someone else. How can we ever know what impact we will have? Are the things we bring from our own culture – like technology – a blessing or a curse here? The only way out of the paradox, is to learn, listen, and to bring your humanity. Is there any other way than to offer something you believe in, while honoring the small ingenuities or qualities you encounter in the other? Otherwise, you either continue dependency cycles or simply are seen as somehow better and wiser simply by merit of your apparent power and wealth. Why do we so often hide the fact under a veneer of “professionalism” that we are interested in benefiting too – that all is not perfect in our world, either, and we are there because we want to enjoy ourselves and learn, not from pity. We are equals, merely sharing skills – we happen to have the ear of the powerful, and some tools that might help bridge the gap. What skills can they share in return? I would love to know how to manage a small farm or even kitchen garden. I’m hoping to get my shamba started as soon as someone can teach me.
It has been an eventful couple of weeks here in Nairobi picking up where we left off with Map Kibera. I think we’ve finally proven that we meant it when we told everyone we’d return – how often have such promises been broken in Kibera? Now, we’re looking more broadly at what it takes to empower people to create, share and use information (maps, data, news reports, personal accounts) about their community to gain greater understanding, spark change and influence policymakers. We’re here for another six months in part to work toward the elusive, coveted goal: sustainability.
A lot has happened since December. We have several different potential partnerships on the horizon – organizations and businesses that want to adopt community mapping in their own programs, and others that want to work directly with the mapping group to collect more data within Kibera. The group has met in our absence and begun to think about how to constitute itself as an organization. This is the outcome we were hoping for.
But, first some plain facts: the mappers needs a lot more support in order to become self-sustaining, in terms of things like organizational know-how, partnership building, avenues for financing, and the most straightforward – improving their skills so they have a strong enough grasp to teach others. This is what we’re ultimately hoping will happen in other slum areas of Nairobi and/or elsewhere in Kenya.
We’re also preparing for a big “push” on community media support, meaning working with a team composed of lead local journalists (some of whom double as mappers) to make full use of the Ushahidi Kibera site, providing technology support (read: getting a website) for their respective publications, and ultimately forming a network of those who wish to collaborate and support each other to produce a truly representative picture of Kibera using new technology. We think that these citizen reporters in combination with the mappers are a formidable team, and at the forefront of new kinds of journalism in Kenya. There’s also room for more creative illustrations of the map including personal videos, stories, and photos. We think the map and related digital media can involve a lot of people in conversations about their vision and hopes for Kibera, and want to spend this time reaching out to as many different people as possible. We think that this way, folks on the ground will be able to influence and share with powerful actors like international organizations and government. This is an evolving vision, and we welcome your comments and thoughts – and always, your help.
We’re also going to work on creating better documentation and analysis of the project for publication and curriculum development, building up the Nairobi social technology and new media community of practice, and various tech projects such as printing the maps (a cartographical challenge).
We’ve also had some interesting visitors. Last week, Ory Okolloh, the Kenyan blogger and one of the founders of Ushahidi, came to Kibera with a Swiss documentary film crew in tow to meet some mappers and also the Kibera journalists who will be working on the Ushahidi site. We realized that she has something (well, probably many things) we lack – the ability to relate to the challenges of being a youth in Kenya: unrepresented by politicians and the media, unemployed, poorly educated, and generally ignored in decision-making, but with the responsibility to build the future of a nation and the strong desire to shape it for the better. Ory grew up near Kibera and started her blog as a way to express some of these frustrations, and she was keenly interested to hear how their encounter with technology had so far inspired the journalists and mappers (I, for one, learned that they were using their phones more often to access the net and particularly the ever-popular Facebook). I wanted her to stay and visit them every week just to inspire them to new visions of how all the work they’re doing can have an impact, and help them break through the barriers they’ve grown up with. It was clear to me that we’re trying to support a new paradigm of citizenship in a country where resignation and cynicism (if not resentment and anger) greets any mention of politics. Ory latched on to one mapper’s shy admission that she enjoyed the “celebrity” of getting attention for this project – such pride can transform into real community leadership and a sense of confidence and possibility. And she is the living example of that.
It’s official: we’re back in Kenya after more than a month visiting family in the US and having meetings and vacation in Europe.
Of course, while we were away, the largest natural disaster since the Asian tsunami took its toll on one small country in the Caribbean. So, as we begin to engage with the next steps of our work here in Kenya, we’re also thinking of the still urgent needs on the other side of the globe.
In fact, OpenStreetMap volunteers around the world have already been quite active making the digital map of Haiti more complete in order to aid relief workers. But now, we have been asked by Ushahidi and Google to consider what it might take to include mapping of Port-au-Prince slums in the response effort. As in Nairobi, these slums are not included in any map that’s been so far made available. Thinking of Map Kibera and our experiences here, how might these efforts be replicated in Port-au-Prince? This could help relief efforts reach into the slums and for the Ushahidi response, would help locate some of the reports and requests for help. It might ensure that slum dwellers are not neglected and have the same access to relief as others. In the long run, such a mapping exercise might bring more local control to the rebuilding process, providing a platform for advocacy for the residents of the informal areas and helping them to assess their own needs.
Of course, Kibera is not Cite Soleil, and we aren’t sure just how much more difficult a mapping exercise might be after a disaster this extreme – or even during normal times. Several years ago, I paid a brief visit to an informal settlement in Port-au-Prince where Haitian staff of the NGO I worked for were afraid to go to work due to insecurity, and the clinic was frequently closed. One thing we are sure of, and that’s the necessity of having local partners who work in the informal settlements and can quickly advise us of the need and feasibility of a mapping activity.
Our questions:
What are the current conditions in the slums? This is something I haven’t found out from the continual stream of media reports on the Haiti situation.
What are the possibilities of carrying out either a brief mapping in those areas highlighting landmarks and road names, for immediate use, or a long-term community mapping similar to Map Kibera?
Now that we’ve finished the initial training and mapping phase of the project, it’s time to look at where we’ll go from here. I have a particular passion for working with community and citizen journalists. Put that together with a map and you have an opportunity to actually locate where stories and events are taking place geographically.
In my view, the map is a way to represent visually the community’s knowledge about itself – it’s both factual and representative of the way this group of 13 wants the rest of the world to see Kibera. Good local journalism is the same, and ultimately we wish to support the kind of empowerment that comes from self-representation and local production of information. When a community becomes engaged in telling the story of who they are and reporting their own facts and their own news, a new kind of communication becomes possible.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned from working in Kibera, it’s that there is A LOT happening in this tightly packed city-within-a-city. As a journalist by nature (and sometimes profession) I get very excited about this. There are a few local organizations that produce community media – print, radio, video – with room for more. Kibera has a population estimated to be as high as one million – larger than many cities in the United States. So we’re now developing a project to put these existing streams of information together in one place on the web.
The entire time we’ve been here (and even before we arrived), I’ve been talking to everyone I can about local media in Kenya. We partnered with two NGOs who happen to work on media in Kibera. Carolina for Kibera (CFK)houses a small volunteer group known as Kibera Worldwide that uses Flip cameras to tell stories about Kibera. Kibera Community Development Agenda (KCODA) publishes the Kibera Journal, a monthly newspaper. We have now trained two journalists from the newspaper and one from local radio station Pamoja FM on mapping. The Flip camera group followed us throughout the mapping process, and I’ve been working most closely with them to create video portraits and interviews around Kibera to bring places on the map and issues of concern to light. They have also picked up some of the mapping skills along the way and produced a short film about the project.
We’ve begun working with Ushahidi to bring these different outlets together along with citizen reporting on events in Kibera. The purpose is not so much to report through the website to Kibera’s residents, who aren’t online most of the time; it’s to link together stories and facts from various community media to allow them to amplify their own coverage to the rest of Nairobi and the world. It’s to provide a shared platform that isn’t owned by any one of them. It’s to offer a way for ordinary residents to SMS reports into a channel that can be accessed by more than just one station or paper when an even occurs, and that can also be seen by authorities and police. It’s also because of a meeting I attended where Kibera’s community leaders met with journalists from Nairobi to discuss what they considered to be poor coverage – none of the positive things that they were doing made the news. The hard work on peace and reconciliation, economic improvement, democracy, health, you name it, went unrecognized. This is a complaint I’ve heard echoed everywhere while working in the community. It became clear that local media in Kibera was missing a link to the mainstream media, but also that they wanted to directly represent themselves – to shout louder.
In fact, sometimes the question about benefit to those who aren’t online misses the point. The digital divide is a fact and needs to be addressed, but when it comes to community information there is also a need for expression outward and collaboration within Kibera. Something like the Kibera Journal or Pamoja FM allows Kibera to talk to itself, while putting facts and stories online allows it to speak to the rest of the world (including wired Nairobi, politicians, national press). Our job, now, is to make sure the world is listening. A place of that size cannot be ignored, but it can and has been spoken on behalf of. This is where I think technology can serve even the poorest and enable them direct access to the eyes and ears of the powerful. It can also project their voices, so that those in power can no longer ignore them. A community with a voice is a community at peace.
We’re now on our second week out mapping Kibera. Our group of intrepid explorers has had two days of training, two days out mapping their neighborhood, and now two days in the computer lab uploading and editing their map data. They have been quite patient and dedicated to the task of learning new computer software, and we’ve pretty much brought the Sodnet offices to maximum computing capacity. Thankfully, we have five technical volunteers who are helping them learn the OpenStreetMap program, upload data, and scan in their paper maps.
We’ve now changed our schedule to accommodate the extra time – and focus — needed in the computer lab – spending one full day in the lab, then one full day in Kibera mapping and discussing our progress.
Here in the lab, we’ve found that computers are funny partners for those who weren’t brought up on Windows, much less Facebook (though we’re proudly starting a Facebook group!). There is the whole problem of click-and-drag, of click versus double-click, of opening and finding something in a web browser as opposed to a folder or flash drive, of typing web addresses precisely and passwords with proper capitalization (common practice is to flick on caps lock instead of shift). The use of a computer is not actually as intuitive as I had come to think. Certainly the keyboard, with its shift and control keys and illogical location of the letters, is not a straightforward tool. A few times, I have been reminded of how I painstakingly studied typing in grade school via a little computer program called Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing. Thanks Mavis! Wish I had a copy for our participants now.
But the fact is, after just three days in the lab and two days in the field, we have quite an impressive amount of marks on the Kibera map. It’s starting to not only resemble other urban areas with churches, schools, and public toilets marked in abundance, but also to reveal the astounding density of the place. After the second day out mapping, we took just five of the villages and had the mappers tally the features they recorded. Here’s the impressive list they made:
I spent Friday morning walking around the village of Raila with Regynnah, one of the mappers, tripping up the dirt pathways alongside trenches filled with running waste water, past small kiosks selling soda and cell phone top-up cards and toddlers chanting in unison “how-are-you!” We stopped at a few pre-primary schools – they seem abundant – and were treated to a little dance and song at one of them.
We toured a toilet facility under construction, and marked an AIDS clinic, chapatti shop, a cobbler. The sheer amount of potential landmarks led me to wonder what everyone had decided was important to map, and we came to a kind of consensus after making that list on the whiteboard. Then underlined features are essential to map, the rest are up to individual discretion.
So the next challenge on our plate is to help build bridges to make use of the information and demonstrate where it fits in to the bigger picture. We’re bringing in various speakers to Kibera to share some of the possibilities for this kind of mapping and introduce the participants to the wider world of technology. So I would say our ambitions are high – it’s a matter of not only teaching computer skills but envisioning the mappers as eventual full participants in the global wired world.
I really wish I knew Swahili. Sitting in the hot sun listening to speeches by every manner of councilor and administrator, including what were apparently fiery political diatribes, some basic Swahili might have kept us there just long enough to hear Prime Minister Raila Odinga himself give a speech. In fact, we’d thought we were going to actually get a chance to meet the PM ourselves, since the Area Chief of Sarangombe – now a fan of Map Kibera – had indicated as much. But this didn’t seem remotely possible once we were sitting in the Olympic primary school grounds at a fundraiser, surrounded by crowds of Kiberans and various suited men and brightly-dressed women. Oh, well. We’re never quite certain of anything until it actually materializes.
But things have materialized, right in front of ours eyes, time and again. On Friday, I showed up at the Ngong Hills Hotel at the invitation of our new friend Kepha, not sure exactly what I was there for. It turned out to be a forum organized by the Moraa New Hope Foundation, where approximately 40 people in various influential positions in Kibera and the Nairobi media discussed how to improve coverage of Kibera. Community leaders complained that some reporters asked for handouts in exchange for coverage; reporters tried to defend their coverage by explaining how something becomes “news”; community journalists (our friends at Pamoja FM and the Kibera Journal) pointed out their vital role as a non-commercial source of local information. It was right in line with our efforts to develop community-generated information sources through Map Kibera. It was clear to me that Kibera residents are tired of being seen negatively, while outsiders want more nuanced information. Hopefully Map Kibera can fill part of the gap between the local self-representation and national and international perception.
In fact, I’ve hardly ever seen such a vibrant, active place as this slum. On Saturday, the streets of Kibera teemed with life – cars covered in ribbons for a wedding party, church groups headed out in matching outfits for service projects, young kids playing football, everyone out shopping or selling, CD kiosks filling the air with music, brightly outfitted music and dance groups getting ready for the PM’s visit. Mikel and I hung around drinking sodas and taking in the scene. It was nice to see kids running about and a general levity that we were told is in sharp contrast to the post-election violence of 2007 and early 2008 – which people mention frequently in conversation, the scars obviously not yet healed.
There seems to be no limit to the energy of Kiberans working as civil servants and community workers, even while plenty others that we have not met are causing the trouble that they seek to remedy. Even our young candidates for the mapping plainly admit that other youths are not so civic-minded, more than one indicating that they wanted to volunteer because “idle hands are the devil’s playthings.” It was difficult to say no to any of them. These are high school graduates, some with college too, in a place where the opportunities don’t measure up to their talents. In fact, we’ve been rather overwhelmed with their interest. And I had worried that the time commitment would be an issue.
The bigger issue might be that for many of them, their computer skills are quite basic. The principal benefit of the project for these participants may turn out to be increased computer literacy – a valid objective in itself. Luckily we’ll have some tech volunteers to help out in the computer lab.
We’ve also invited some video reporters to participate from a group called Kibera Worldwide. They will be gathering stories alongside the mappers, which will provide further illustration of the place from the point of view of the residents. My hope is that this can further blossom into a map-based platform to connect local community media to the rest of Nairobi and the rest of the world. So the meeting with the PM might never happen, but I’d be satisfied with the respect of the average Kibera resident.
“Well, actually it’s not rocket science!” Levis said with visible relief after we’d marked the location of Big Five Tours on Khapta road, explaining to yet another set of curious security guards what we were up to. Clearly, he’d been genuinely afraid after the morning’s workshop. Having run out of batteries almost immediately out of the gate, in both my GPS and my digital camera, I can’t say I fared too well in the trial-run mapping party. But we managed to get a group of Danish students working on climate change advocacy really excited about mapping, and most of them returned with long tracks and careful notation. So far, so good.
It’s been a whirlwind week here in Nairobi. As I write, Mikel is making an impromptu presentation of the project for members of Pamoja Trust, one of the most well-known and respected community organizations working in Kibera. And yesterday we spent the whole day at MS ActionAid Kenya, where the Danish students were introduced to mapping techniques along with several others from organizations as diverse as Ushahidi, UNICEF, Umande Trust, and World Bike. We actually walked around with the GPS units in the Westlands neighborhood. This was also great practice for those of us who will be working on the project but aren’t exactly fully versed in the technical aspects of mapping, shall we say.
There have been so many helpful yet challenging conversations with groups on the ground here in Nairobi that my head is now spinning. Kipp and Phillip from a group called Sodnet have offered us advice and also precious office space, just out of a sense of cameraderie and shared goals. On Tuesday, we went down to Kibera and trekked around in the mud before we found Carolina for Kibera’s office, where we talked to Kenny about practical details and some practical realities. Out of this conversation, we now have a game plan for recruiting local youth as well as an all-important meeting with the village chiefs next week for their blessing. Around every corner, it seems, is another person offering support and advice, and every time there are unexpected connections that vouch for the shrinking globe.
One emerging theme in our discussions with various community organizations and international development folks is that the collection of map data can be perceived in many different ways. We certainly won’t be the first to collect information from the citizens in this often targeted slum, and even if the data doesn’t require talking to anyone (we’re recording visible features, not demographics), the very process will mean talking to everyone. What is the information being collected for, and what will it bring with it? Usually, such surveying is done in anticipation of a government relocation, or slum upgrading program, or a new water scheme, or a sewage project, or, currently, a plan to move people who live too close to the railroad line. It may be difficult to impart what seems obvious to those who conceived of a project like OpenStreetMap – that it’s by and for the people, it’s unowned, another way to move control of information into the public domain and into public hands. In this vein, we’re involving community groups who work on media and technology here since they have already worked on some of the same goals. Community media – TV, radio, film – has made major inroads through some truly amazing projects like Carolina for Kibera’s work with Flip cameras, local newspaper Kibera Journal, and Pamoja FM’s radio outreach. It’s exciting to see that when it comes to journalism, storytelling and reporting is already in the hands of citizens themselves. If all goes well, we’ll be able to produce some interesting media together. Stay tuned.
Having arrived two full days late to Nairobi, we’ve now started to adjust to the new surroundings with the help of our kind host, Adriel, local partner Levis, and Phillip and Kipp from Sodnet, an NGO here in Nairobi that promises to be a great resource for Map Kibera. Thanks to these four, we’ve had quite a pleasant introduction to a city that is known abroad mostly for its crime, traffic, and as an unpleasant but necessary stopover on the way to your safari. So far, I’m more impressed with Nairobi’s greenery, wealth, and ultramodern conveniences than its after-dark dangers, and hopefully it will stay that way.
Just a couple of things that surprised me about Nairobi, as a first-time visitor. First off: mobile money. I might have known that mobile banking was well established in Kenya thanks to the Economist article a few weeks back, which I read carefully on the plane. I knew that in Kenya and several other African countries, money could be deposited into your cell phone account and sent via text message to a vendor or individual, who would then be able to access it and cash it out as they like. What I didn’t realize was quite how ubiquitous it would be. I learned that you could send money to almost anyone, including the cop pressing you for a bribe. We were even told muggers might demand your M-Pesa account before your wallet. But as soon as you transfer the money, a receipt with the name of the recipient appears on your phone, so wouldn’t that seem to be a hindrance? But convenient, in any case. You can even withdraw mobile money from ATMs. Is this the end of bank branches? The next frontier of finance? Seems like it to me. And my favorite part about it is that it developed naturally as people experimented with sending phone minutes back home via text in lieu of cash remittances. So far, I’m a big fan – and I wonder, why don’t we have this in the US? We’re so backwards with all our “cash” (OK, so I haven’t actually tried this mobile banking thing yet, so I might have to eat my words – we’ll see).
What else? The Nakumatt superstores. Now, as opposed to mobile banking, which really has the potential to benefit poorer customers (as a way to safely store and use money without a bank account, for starters), Nakumatt is a brand designed for the wealthier Kenyans. Like a jazzier, more appealing Walmart, Nakumatt stores are enormous and carry nearly everything under the sun. Only, the grocery store is front and center, and the variety and quality of food there is amazing. There are flashy TV screens near the register to “entertain” you in line, and – get this – the place is open 24 hours. Apparently Kenyans will sometimes shop very late at night in order to avoid the horrendous traffic in the city, we were told. I cannot think of a 24-hour everything store that is open all night in New York or anywhere else I’ve lived. Shopping there felt like stepping into the future.
Now, all this might belie the fact that we’re staying in a quite posh area known as Hurlingham. Filled with enormous glassy new construction apartment complexes with elaborate security systems and right next to State House Road, tree-lined boulevard of embassies and the abode of the president himself, the area is hardly home to the hoi-polloi. However, more than most “developing country” cities I’ve visited, this type of wealth seems spread around the city and suburbs rather than relegated to one gated enclave. In other words, middle and upper class Kenyans seem to dominate a fair amount of the city. All this provides a certain context, and contrast, to the Kibera slum that we will be working in quite soon. Just after shopping at Nakumatt, grocer to the stars, we drove along the edge of Kibera past tiny corrugated-iron shacks sufficing for storefronts. The same kinds of goods could be bought there that we found at the superstore – vegetables, electronics, housewares, cell phone cards – but the shopping experience could not be more different. I hope that this contrast in culture can be illustrated, hinted at, in our map. It will certainly be on display here on the blog.
as we’ve done in Nairobi, with young people who want to map their own villages, and think of other ways that the rural community can hold information locally for policy impact and self-advocacy. With a receptive MP this can be very effective; he complained to us that he simply doesn’t have enough basic facts on the area’s needs. Collecting, sharing, talking, and thinking about community needs might mean starting mobile phone radio or storytelling with the local girls’ club. I think it’s really important not to plan too much from the outside (Nairobi), but to come with ideas and allow the process to develop organically. Certainly, that’s what has worked in Kibera. I’m ready for this process to be much slower than it’s been in Nairobi. Everything is slower in Wongonyi. I certainly don’t mind. Walking and then talking face-to-face is still the primary communication method, although mobile towers allow for decent coverage. Everything is done on a personal level: small projects come and go, each meant to provide income: butterfly farming, biogas collection, etc. What might happen if some of the girls in the girls’ club had the experience of creating short videos or audio recordings about their lives, or about anything at all. Would it be a confidence-builder, could they even participate in the village planning process this way with pride in their special knowledge of a technology that others don’t know? That’s been a boost to our current group, made them feel smart and proud. Or is that simply going too far: after all, the girls in the club lead what we’re told is a tough life of household work, farming, and school, and leaving their chores for even one hour a week can be a tough sell to parents.
