Thematic mapping – water & sanitation

by: March 3rd, 2011 comments: 0

Thematic mapping in Mathare kicked off yesterday! The past three weeks since the Mathare community forum the team has been concentrating on video training and new media work with the Mathare participants. We’ve had some really exciting discussions about how we can support the spin-off blogging project and integrate with SMS reporting in Mathare. We have also been working to develop data collection forms so that the mappers could begin collecting water and sanitation information.

We separated the data collection forms into three types of objects 1) toilets 2) water points 3) open defecation areas (or athara as they are known in Mathare). We printed out 10 copies of each data collection form with the hope of field testing them with the mappers. We wanted to know “do they make sense?” “What questions and/or responses are we missing?”

Questions for the data collection forms were drawn from the Map Kibera team’s experience mapping water and sanitation points of interest and from Community Cleaning Services and Plan Kenya’s work on urban community total led sanitation in Mathare (view the draft data collection forms here).

A team of 11 Mathare mappers gathered at Community Transformer. We went over each question on each form. In terms of mapping toilets, there was debate about the various types of toilets. “Pit latrine” was straight forward, as well as “hanging toilet” (a toilet that sits over a river or drain and drops directly into the water below – we’ve also been told that in some parts of Asia this is referred to as a helicopter toilet). Other types of toilets “Asian” and “European” and “Trench” weren’t immediately clear to the mappers.

The team broke into 3 separate groups to test out the forms. The main feedback on the forms included breaking the types of government run toilets into those run by the CDF vs LATF. This will be important for different groups that undertake social auditing. The other observation is that water in Mathare is usually purchased by the 20L gallon, so we changed the data collection form to that effect.

water vendor in Mathare

Measuring the number of people of use a toilet per day is difficult. For toilets that sit by the river and do not have a caretaker, this is nearly impossible (without sitting and counting people entering the toilet). Collecting information about toilets that belong to institutions (schools and churches) is quite time consuming. Entering the premises requires a formal introduction to the secretary or other person-in-charge. The school and church we visited were very welcoming and gave us quite a bit of information. We were able to find out that there are about 800 staff and students using just 6 toilets and 1 urinal at the school. The church next door had 5 toilets that were very well maintained. The church has about 100 visitors on week days and 500-1000 on the weekend.

Toilets at the school

Mapping a CCS toilet

Open Defecation areas (or athara) are large areas where people come to shit outside. This is due to lack of access to toilets – for reasons such as ability to pay, proximity to the nearest toilet, security, etc. These areas are used in the early morning and evening due to the issue of privacy. It is very difficult to estimate the number of people who use an athara – the only good option would be to count the piles of shit (not feasible in this case, because the volunteer mappers don’t have the appropriate footwear nor expertise in sanitation issues). More on mapping open defecation areas….

Javin mapping open defecation area

In UCLTS style, shit in an open defecation area

Every organization or a CBO or an NGO is looking for a different set of information when carrying out work on water and sanitation. The Map Mathare team is building a geographic database of different facilities with some basic attribute information. It’s our hope that sanitation specialists, public officials, youth groups, CBOs and others can and will utilize this information. At this point, we are in the process of field testing data collection tools to determine the baseline the mappers will build . In this case, the accuracy of information the mappers collect will decrease with the number of questions on the data collection tool, so we are looking for the balance between accuracy and level of detail. The mappers and the coordination team are learning a lot! By the end of March we hope to have a team of 10-20 dedicated, certified mappers!

ICTD London: one Kibera perspective

by: March 2nd, 2011 comments: 0

At ICTD London 2010 conference, Kibera mapper and journalist Douglas Namale was inspired to write this post:

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.

Update on video in Mathare (and Kibera)

by: March 1st, 2011 comments: 0

This is a fairly short and quick update on video in Mathare and even shorter in Kibera.

One of our ideas at the beginning of the video program in Mathare was that video guys would go on the field with mappers and collect what they are doing. We thought this would be important for several reasons:

  • it would create harmony between different groups (mappers and video)
  • this way we would document every step of the process and thus create awareness of the project which could later be used for attracting funders, etc.
  • with public screenings, we could show the community what we’re up to

We then decided that mappers and video teams together would present too big of a group walking around Mathare and would raise too much attention so we dropped the case. Now that the community is aware of our presence, this is again something we can think about.

From the start we always presented all the programs as one and the same thing – getting the info about Mathare out there, with all means possible. When talking about video and unity, the current situation in Mathare is that we have a group of around 20 video guys, many of them also community bloggers and a part of our mapping program, and who want to be involved with Voice as well, because they see all three programs as one.

How we conduct the trainings in Mathare:

In Mathare we’ve partnered with Nathaniel Canuel who has created a very interesting training program with which he is trying to inspire the group to explore their individual talents. For example, to stir their imagination he created a collage of videos from some of the world’s most famous films (Apocalypse Now, The Godfather, etc) – the theme was, “the marriage of picture and sound.” He also showed them several videos which were made in Kenya and some of his own work. After and during they had discussions about different camera angles, sounds, effects, etc.

My understanding from the meetings and trainings is that the participants in the video program want to explore the potential of video. They want to use it to showcase the stories from Mathare, the stories of their friends, relatives, the way of living, etc., and they want to do it in an interesting way.

The trainings usually go on like this:

  • Nathaniel shocks them with all different artsy stuff
  • They hold discussions about things they’ve just seen
  • They discuss different issues in Mathare and how much work a certain issue would need
  • They pick issues and talk in detail about how they will go about it (Nathaniel is guiding them and asking them a lot of hard questions)
  • They take footage and edit

To stir their imagination and make video interesting to the participants and the people watching it, we decided (together with the participants) to do a game or a competition, where very abstract titles will be chosen and then the group will make videos to go along with those titles (this will be a fun addition to the “serious” work they are doing). The videos will be presented at public screenings where the community will decide the winner. We figured people will want to see these videos, and it’s also a way to have some fun. If I quote Jeff: “People here are tired of all the bad and depressing stories, it’s about time we do something different!”

These are just some of the quick updates on how things are going. You can see the first videos from Mathare here and also Kibera News Network is back on track with new videos here.

Oh… The first story which came out of “let’s have some fun” is: Welcome to a Dog’s World by Joe Gatecha from Kibera News Network.

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