Map Kibera

Update: Zack has his visa! After some kind of intervention by friends, Zack was called by the High Commission to receive his visa today! Thanks very much everyone for the support. We now have our best hopes in place for Douglas to have a successful application. And as Kepha noted in the comments, even with friends to push for Zack, the underlying problems remain in a prejudiced system, and we will continue to advocate for fairness in the international system of development.

I’m not sure if it’s appropriate to raise our predicament publicly, but an injustice has been done. I must try all avenues available to right this situation. If after reading this, you have any ideas on how to proceed, please get in touch.

One of our participants, Zacharia Wambua, applied for and received a travel scholarship to attend the ICTD Conference next month at Royal Holloway, University of London. Zack is one of our brightest mappers, and shows great promise to take on this work as a career (Zack is standing to the right of US Ambassador to Kenya Ranneberger in this picture). The conference was going to be an opportunity for him to network, especially with UK universities, and take part in our panel focused on citizen mapping and media projects. He was to be joined by fellow mapper, Douglas Namale. For Zack, this would be his first time traveling outside Kenya, and I’m sure a life changing experience for a highly intelligent young man from Kibera.

As required, Zack submitted an application for a business visa (ref NAIROBI\323731), and took great care to fill out the application honestly and comprehensively. Yesterday, he received noticed that he was refused entry, with no opportunity to appeal. The decision gives no weight to our organization, the Map Kibera Trust, and draws attention to Zack’s economic situation as the primary evidence for the decision that, in the view of the UK Border Agency, Zack is not genuinely seeking to attend this conference.

To me, this is a deep systematic failure, based on probabilities. Zack is impoverished, it’s true. But he is working very hard to improve himself and situation, partly through participating in our programs. Despite having very little financial ties, or having family with a bank account, he is in fact very tied to his family, church and community. I’m not sure how you are supposed to show evidence of strong relationships to your family in a visa application. Zack is volunteering with a program, that among other things, has been featured on the BBC, is the subject of a DFID funded and UK university led research program, and he’s been invited to a prestigious conference organized by UNESCO and the University of London, that focuses on social and economic development through technology. Yet he is denied entry by the UK Border Agency. This is a terrible contradiction.

Frankly, if being poor is a barrier to taking part in these kind of activities, then the intentions of the entire conference, the work of DFID, etc, are completely negated.

We understand that an incorrect decision could have been made. However, Zack has been denied the right of appeal, the right to an interview, and the right for his supporters to speak on his behalf. Therefore, I ask, if there’s anything you can see we can do in this situation that could lead to a change of decision, we’d greatly appreciate the advice and action.

Youth Initiatives Kenya

I have decided I’m going to post my working diary or my weekly reviews for a number of reasons. First reason is transparency. I want my work to be transparent, out there, without secrets. Second is advice. We’re working in different terrains than the ones we come from, meaning geographically and culturally, and we need advice from people in order to better understand the places we work in and to minimize the conflict. It’s also good practice to keep track. Last but not least is that we DO want our programs to be replicated in as many marginalized areas as possible and this will hopefully be a good reference point for how to do it.

To keep everybody up to date I’ll start by shortly summarizing the work we’ve done (mostly the work I’ve been involved with) in the past couple of weeks.

KIBERA

The most important task that lies ahead of the whole team and the teams in Kibera is working on sustainability of the three programs (Map Kibera, Voice of Kibera and Kibera News Network). This means that we’re working with our teams on strategic vision and mission, future activities, internal structure, budget and fundraising, and procedures for recruitment and membership. It’s not an easy task by any means; it takes a lot of our time and nerves but it’s a necessary, crucial and probably the most important step of the programs. I’ll let my collegues Mikel, Erica, Jamie and Jane talk more on bureaucratic issues and the fun they have with lawyers and other administration people.

We’re still working on an Atlas of Kibera with Emma Engelson, who used to work as an intern at UN-Habitat. The Atlas will contain 5 maps focusing on health, education, water and sanitation, security and religious institutions and an additional poster with a big map and detailed description of the project. It’ll then be up to our mapping team to distribute the Atlas in Kibera to schools and NGOs and others, and to talk and hold lectures about the data they’ve collected in order to build the communication around it with different stakeholders and other interested parties. In other words they need to make this data now come to life.

We were also working on the publicity of mapping and all the other programs – we understand it’s important to be out there, we need to make the community know who the Map Kibera teams are and understand what they do, let them know where to go to obtain data and where to go to put themselves on the map or get their voices out there. For that purpose we’re working on a comprehensive media launch for Voice of Kibera and Kibera News Network and also on making maps visible by displaying them on public places, walls etc. Another big task!

Another issue concerning Kibera programs is trainings in Mathare. How will our teams participate in the trainings of the Mathare participants? For that purpose we had a three day long work shop with an amazing Dr Mark Skipper from Aptivate on inquiry led learning in an inquiry-led way – sort of training for trainers. I believe all the teams did really well; I also believe they now better understand why working together and expansion is important and inevitable. The details of the training should fit into a blog of its own.

MATHARE

I’ve mentioned it above that we are, or better have been, slowly moving our operations to Mathare.

In the last month I’ve spend many days roaming Mathare with Simon Kokoyo to find the venue for trainings. I visited a bunch of organizations like Community Transformers, YIKE, NGEI 1, Youth Congress, Mathare Environmental (Pequininos), Rebel Film Board, Nzumari, Community Development Center Huruma, Furaha Educational Center, Maji Mzuri and many individuals. We found some very nice locations for our trainings and people were very excited that a programs like ours are coming to Mathare – which is good news.

Jamie and I have been working on a work plan for the next 4 months in Mathare. We had a meeting regarding this work plan with our partners Plan Kenya, their local partner in Mathare CCS (Comunity Cleaning Services), and COOPI. The main massages from the meeting were:

* In order for the programs to become sustainable we “mzungus” must not be the entry point in Mathare. That’s why Rose and Joseph from CCS and Simon from COOPI and Community Development Center Huruma undertook the task of community mobilizing and planning and facilitating activities for an open forum. The open forum will be the entry event, a “trigger” into Mathare programs.
* Need to mobilize the leaders, elders, chiefs whose role in the program will be the role of community organization and mobilization. Make sure they are informed and give them key selling points (information to direct resources).
* Gender equality; mobilize young women to the initial forum.
* Address structure owners, if it comes to it, by explaining to them that we’re investing in their needs (needs like introducing water and sanitation infrastructure).
* If there is any chance of sustainability of the programs there should be an income generating activity. This is a very delicate issue as we’re not offering jobs but trainings, and the ability to learn new skills. So our message from the start should be, as Simon said, that we’re enhancing value to the existing services and the data can be used to better lives.
* Start simple at the beginning and then grow. This means we present the skills but let people decide how to use them, we let people to think about the issues and places that need mapping and reporting – this will be, should be, and should stay community driven programs.
* Preparation of teams in Kibera for the roles of trainers.

In other news: we have successfully obtained the satellite imagery of Mathare and had a plan to digitize its borders, with the help of Map Kibera technical team (Hassan and Zach) but in the meeting with Plan, CCS and COOPI it was said not to start with the digitalization of the borders because people need to be somehow included in drawing up the borders of Mathare. I also realized that the villages in Mathare are many and the borders are very disputable. There was even some discussion on what is Mathare area.
I raised an issue regarding how big the buffer area of Mathare is and if we need to include the buffer into our mapping efforts. Apparently the buffer area is quite big as people in Mathare depend a lot on the surrounding areas (like business along Juja road or Thika road and parts of Eastleigh) and the decision was that we should include these areas because they are of big significance to the Mathare people.
We will still proceed with the digitalization of main buildings and roads from satellite imagery.

Mathare and sorrounding areas

In order to start preparation for the video component in Mathare we visited Rebel Film Board which consists of a group of young people from different youth groups which were trained in video and editing by Owen from Rebel Film Board. We also met with Jeff Mohamed, a young and talented documentary film-maker, Nathaniel who has a lot of experience in filming and video editing, and representatives of Slum TV. They can all be of great help and a big resource in the area of video reporting. We wanted to build a core team around these guys who would be, along with KNN guys, the point personnel of the video component. At the same time, fears were raised that the level of expertise of this group might intimidate newcomers, so while these guys will certainly play a big role, this role is still being defined.

There’s more to say and much more has happened, but for the start this should be enough, even too much. The main message should be Kibera is still kicking and it’s getting a new feel to it. Mathare is kicking off. Stay tuned. It’s bound to get fun. I’ll keep you posted.