The Power of One (or Two or Three)

Jan 11, 2011

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Janie Hayes
communications consultant, DefeatDD

On a recent trip to Kenya, I made my first trip to Kibera, the largest slum in Africa.

Kibera is one of the more visible African slums - featured in the last decade in the movie the Constant Gardener and a recent book by Bill Bryson, with visits from the likes of Gordon Brown.   

But Kibera has been around for many years as an informal settlement for nearly a century. The vast majority of residents live in mud-walled huts; the luckiest have a sheet of tin atop the walls to serve as a roof.  The official census shows around 100,000 people residing in Kibera, but independent studies estimate 1-2 million. On a recent drive through the slum, the latter number seemed much more likely - the area is sprawling, with people everywhere, homes wall-to-wall and only the thinnest dirt paths for walkways. In many places, sewage or runoff water trickles through those passages. 

The Kenyan government owns all the land in Kibera, but does not officially acknowledge the settlement, so there are no basic services: schools, clinics, electricity, running water, or toilets. It also means massive overcrowding, plenty of rubbish and other filth, and health and crime risks lurking around every corner.   

The services that do exist in Kibera are privately owned. In the US, when we hear about services being “privately owned,” we think of electricity corporations or cable TV companies. Not so much the Wise Ladies Self-Help Group or the Egesa Day Care Community School, two of the projects that are being run by local Kibera communities to improve the health of the population. But these two groups - set up by Kibera residents, for Kibera residents - serve as two inspirational examples of how much can be done by those who have very, very little. 

With gracious hosts Francis and Joseph from the Kenyan Water for Health Organization(KWAHO), on a November afternoon my colleague Turi and I visited Wise Ladies Self Help Group. Wise Ladies (which also includes men) is a membership group implementing projects through microcredit loans. Formed in 2004, the group has opened a nursery school that hosts 40 children and also provides a feeding program for children. Their current focus is a block of clean, lighted latrines and washrooms with clean water that can be used by the community for a fee. Prior to its grand opening, the Wise Ladies had already received membership “dues” from 1,000 families in the area. They hope that, given a few years time, they can both turn a small profit and also reduce the threat of common but deadly illnesses like diarrhea in their community.

Traveling on, we find the Egesa Day Care Community School, a simple mud-walled building with a modest dirt courtyard, on the very edge of Kibera, hidden behind a small door in a winding walkway of the slum. The building sits in the very shadow of the former president of Kenya's home, which is up on a rise just outside the slum's border - a large colonial-style mansion with guards and a well tended garden.                

Down below in the dirt courtyard of Egesa, about 20 small children run around, most of them without shoes. The headmaster, a jovial character in a white button-down shirt, referees the children's spats, wipes runny noses, and dodges a makeshift soccer match while telling us about the facility.

Only a year old, the daycare center serves 45 children and plans to enroll 150 by the end of 2011. Because most families can't afford more than one meal a day for their children, the school also provides lunch of porridge and beans. A recent improvement is the provision of clean drinking water. While the school itself doesn't have access to potable water, the headmaster and volunteers utilize Sodis, a method of disinfecting drinking water by storing it in bottles in the sun for hours at a time. The headmaster shared that he has noticed a significant reduction in illness among the children under five since they began providing clean water to the students.

As we left Kibera in the late afternoon sun, I was struck by the enormous contribution that both of these groups are making for the health of their communities, despite being among the poorest citizens in one of the world's poorest countries. As an employee for a large international NGO, this visit indeed reminded me why I set out on this career path in the first place. But most of all it humbled me with the realization that the most powerful change agents in the world are likely not me, or those like me. They are those - like the Wise Ladies and Egesa - who have come together to do the work with no donor requirement or paycheck, but simply for the change it will make in their own, everyday worlds.  

-- Janie Hayes is a communications officer focused on PATH's diarrheal disease advocacy efforts.