Wongonyi and the first map from scratch

Posted on | February 16, 2012 | No Comments

Two years ago I embarked on my first freelance mapping adventure in Africa. Prior to my arrival in Kenya in 2009, I connected with Ronald Mdawida, co-director of Kosmos Solutions International, a small NGO operating in both Taita Hills and the slums of Nairobi. Once in Kenya, I had time on my hands. I met with Ronnie, and, armed with little more than a GPS unit and a computer, traveled to his home village of Wongonyi, located near the Kenyan coast in Taita Hills.

The villages in the area didn’t, and still don’t, have electricity. After talking to the local chief in the area we (or rather he) made a plan to map the entirety of Wongonyi Sublocation, which consists of five villages. I decided to map all the individual houses, public buildings and other amenities in these villages (such as water points, etc.).  I had no idea what to expect, but I was eager to see what the data on the completed map would reveal.  Unfamiliar with the local landscape, I asked my guide Isaiah to draw me a sketch of the area.

In the beginning the task didn’t seem very large, but I was quickly overwhelmed. The area was vast (something the sketch didn’t reveal) and rough, and the sun was relentless. In the first couple of days, I got blisters on my ears because I didn’t wear a hat and on my feet from walking too much, and I was exhausted because of heat, the hight and the tough terrain. While the terrain slowed our progress immensely, there was another, more unexpected repeating occurrence that threw up a roadblock – the kindness of the Wongonyi people. Every time we stopped to map the location of a house, we had to stop for tea, or lunch or snacks, talk about our work, old times, weather, or life in general. This slowed us down significantly, sometimes for hours. Because of this, Isaiah and I developed a technique to minimize the time spent at each house: we would make sure no one saw us, sneak from the bush, take a GPS point, draw a quick sketch, and sneak back into the jungle. It was all out guerrilla mapping.

After a month, the map started coming together piece by piece. The terrain played an important role in the area, and throughout fieldwork, I considered how to represent it. I knew the map wouldn’t be complete without it.

I uploaded all of my data onto Open Street Map, switched on a layer option called Cycle Map, and took a series of screenshots of the area. Next, I opened the shape files of the same area in ArcGIS and used those shape files as the base layer. I imported the screenshots, glued them together and georeferenced them. Then, I digitized over the pictures; this produced contour lines, which I later used on the finished map (see below).

Since all the contour lines had height attributed to them, it was just a small step further to create a 3D presentation of the region; this was done by Thomas Chapman, a South African architect friend of mine, who was able to use this 3D map for planing purposes in the area.

This trip to Wongonyi was my first encounter with African rural life, and I spent a lot of time learning about the daily hardships residents face. The roads into and out of the area are at times impassable.  Public facilities, when they exist, are underfunded. There are few jobs, and alcoholism is a big problem. It saddened me to see the friends I had made encounter such obstacles on a regular basis.

The Wongonyi experience was also very important for my personal development: I began to develop my own method of participatory mapping, I became inspired to create my first blog, and I learned lessons that would prepare me for the work I was about to embark on in the crowded informal settlements of Nairobi.

Below you can see the finished map and here are some of the pictures of Wongonyi from my Flickr photo stream.

Mwananyamala

Posted on | November 15, 2011 | No Comments

I often wonder how places get their names. My interest was rekindled while I was working in Kwale, a rural area in the south-eastern most tip of Kenya, where I got familiar with the history of some of the places there. I was at the same time reading John Steinbeck’s East of Eden where he, at the beginning of the book, talks about how it is a duty and a privilege of the first explorers to name new places.

Places get names through various processes and the place name evolves over time. The primary division is between the names of natural features and the names of human settlements. The first explorers had to name the places in order to identify and map them. The names ranged from the names of the saints (San Francisco, USA) or the religious holidays celebrated at particular stopping places (Soledad – Solitude, USA). Then they named the places according to how the expedition felt at the time (Cape of Good Hope, SA), descriptively after the natural features (Horrible Hollow Hill, Tasmania), after the animals seen (Los Gatos – the cats, USA) or after the nature of the place itself (Rainbow Mountains, USA). It goes without saying that they also named the places after people (Georgetown, USA). But to me the most interesting are the names of places which describe things which happened there or as Steinbeck puts it: “each name suggests a story which has been forgotten”. An example of the latter is the story of Mwananyamala, a small African village and it’s name, a story which hasn’t been forgotten to this day.

The story goes like this: Back in the old days, when there were less people and their houses more scattered, a big population of lions lived in the area around the village. The lions would sneak into the village under the cover of darkness to look for food, mostly pigs which people raised. The people knew they were coming. They heard the footsteps and recognized the heavy breathing of lions in the dark. People would sit in their houses, too scared to move, too scared to breathe. Quietly, with a whisper, the mothers sang to their children to comfort them: “Mwananyamala!”, “Baby be quiet!”

So what’s the story of your current place of residence? I’m currently in Nairobi which name comes from Maasai phrase Enkare Nyirobi, which translates to “the place of cool waters”. (Today it could be called “the place of polluted waters”).

 

ICT and the water sector: Water problems in Kibera and Mathare slums

Posted on | October 19, 2011 | No Comments

This is the second blog posts I wrote for the World Bank’s Water Hackathon. Together with Simon Kokoyo, Kepha Ngito and Maximilian Hirn, I organized a series of community meetings to better understand how ICT can provide solutions to water problems in the informal settlements.

Here’s the video showcasing a forum in Kibera by Kibera News Network

The Kibera and Mathare Forums: Identifying water related problems in the informal settlements

Kibera and Mathare are two of the biggest slums in Kenya, and Africa. The population estimates vary and are highly debatable. For example, estimates of the population of Kibera vary between 170,000 and 1 million. What is certain is that the areas are big, hosting at least hundreds of thousands, but are informal and self-organized, are stricken by poverty, crime and disease, and lack basic services such as sufficient access to safe water and sanitation.

When organizing a community forum in complex places like Kibera and Mathare it is important to know who to talk to. Good local connections are key. Having had a presence in the slums for almost two years now, I got in touch with Simon Kokoyo from Mathare and Kepha Ngito from Kibera. Between them, these two community leaders have 30 years of experience working in Kibera and Mathare. With the help of their networks, we were able to mobilize the right type of people, ranging from water vendors, water buyers, opinion leaders, NGO representatives, provincial administration and researchers, all involved in water sector. Through the World Bank, we were able to invite the Nairobi City Water and Sewage Company, which is the main water supplier in Nairobi.

The main purpose of the forums was for the people to talk about the issues related to water. The forum was divided into introductions, a short presentation by Map Kibera Trust on mapping of water and sanitation in Kibera and Mathare (including short films created by Kibera News Network), a short presentation by Nairobi City Water and Sewage Company on their informal settlements program, discussions to determine which are the biggest issues regarding water in informal settlements, and working groups to dissect each issue into challenges, solutions and concrete action steps.

The main issues, challenges, solutions and action steps that came out of the forum are:

1. Cartels/Prices/Vandalism

According to the participants in the forums, the biggest barrier to accessing water in their communities is the cartels. Cartels consist of community members who own water points (often illegally connected to public pipes) and try to monopolize this supply with violence to keep prices high. Local politicians and even the water suppliers themselves often back these cartels. The cartels create artificial water shortages and, through vandalism and threats, hike up prices. The community feels powerless against these cartels and is very passive in tackling the problem, while the local administration and the government don’t solve the problem because some people gain from the status quo. The perverse outcome is that water prices are much higher in informal areas like Mathare and Kibera then they are in fancy Nairobi suburbs like Karen or Riverside.

According to the participants, the concrete solutions and the action steps to tackle the problem would be empowerment of the community members to monitor the water supply; creation of mechanisms to respond to water shortages, such as SMS reporting systems; high penalties for offenders (people vandalizing); coordination and consultation between the different stakeholders like the government, Nairobi City Council, Nairobi City Water and Sewage Company, and the community members; regular operations to dismantle illegal connections and cartels; and electing, educating and appointing community monitors to monitor water distribution and water levels.

2. Billing

A key billing issue are wrongly estimated and accumulated bills (so called “burden bills”), which often occur because utility meter reading staff refuse to venture into the slums; the residents then reject the resulting bills, which are perecieved as unfair, which leads to disconnections, which then in turn lead residents to either use overpriced cartel owned waterpoints, or to break into public pipes themselves. Other billing issues include bills being sent to the wrong addresses because of lack of a proper housing address system, and a lack of a mechanisms for easy payment of bills, without going to central offices that are often far away and expensive to get to.

The participants saw the solutions in setting up payments mechanisms through mobile phones (an approach piloted but not yet implemented by NCWSC), an improved system of reading water meters (e.g. SMS based self-reading of meters for areas where NCWSC reader-staff do not go themselves), educating the community in how to read water meters so they don’t fall prey to fraud and scams, and a negotiated settlement between the communities and the water suppliers to forgive the (often wrongly estimated) debts which accumulated and start anew once the systems are up.

3. Quality of Water

Water is highly contaminated, smells, has a weird color and has particles inside. This is because old, rusty pipes often break and water is polluted by the open drainage lines and sewage lines which run parallel to the water network. This causes frequent disease outbreaks. Water is also not properly stored in the houses, and storage tanks are not regularly cleaned and often not closed (with animals falling in, drowning and polluting the supply). People at the forum explained that people don’t think much about the quality of water because the water itself is so hard to get in any form. They specifically mentioned the absence of any education or support for household level treatment, even though easy solutions exist (e.g. solar disinfection with simple transparent water bottles).

The solution lies in better planning of water, drainage and sewage networks, regular monitoring of quality of water, publishing of water quality data, educating the community on water quality issues; a key step would also be the publication of water quality testing data on the internet, with an easily understandable map-based interface. Strikingly, this type of data is regularly collected by Nairobi Water utility at over 300 sampling sites, but is currently not published i.e. not accessible for regular people.

Following the community water discussion, Nairobi Water has decided to make this data public (!) for the first time.  Hackers are invited to make use of it here.

4. Connectivity/Access/Availability

The major problem regarding availability of water is that there is simply not enough safe water to satisfy the demand of the population. Water suppliers seem to be struggling with too few water sources, inadequate infrastructure and the rising population. The new settlements, especially informal ones, cannot be connected to the existing water network because water suppliers lack the resources and residents are often unable to pay for the connections. The settlements that do get connected are often subjected to vandalism because of competing interests, complicated bureaucratic procedures, and inconsistent price ranges for connections, water rationing, and bad water quality.

Solutions lie in finding or constructing additional water sources thus improving the water harvesting (this will have to range from major new upstream dam construction to new sources such as rain-water harvesting); lowering, standardizing and publicizing the water connection prices; credit-schemes for connection-fee payments; and sensitizing the community members on better treatment of scarce water resources.

5. Community ownership of the projects

The main challenge is how to tailor projects to community needs and ensure that the community feels ownership of water related projects. The problems seem to be: taking the responsibility for the projects and their successes and failures; competing interests of different stakeholders; and, consequently, lack of information and coordination between the stakeholders. Nairobi water utility representatives have highlighted that even as a quasi-governmental institution they often run into problems because of lack of community ownership that causes them to deal with bad/false actors, have supplies and kiosks stolen or damaged and to encounter all forms of resistance that undermine a sustainable supply.

The solution is building platforms for better access to open information, building better communication channels between the involved parties, and the sensitizing and raising awareness within the communities that should be the driving force behind the projects that are being planned within their communities.

6. Coordination and partnerships

Coordination and partnerships between different stakeholders is suffering from lack of monitoring and transparency; competing interests, which often lead to duplication of projects and illegal connections; ignorance (neighbors don’t know what each other are doing); and corruption.

Solutions could be setting up systems to monitor the organizations dealing with water issues, forming water and sanitation committees that would oversee the projects in their communities, and building a communication platform for these organizations to share information.

7. Land tenure issues and the impact of environmental degradation on water

The biggest problems are population growth, the illegal construction of infrastructure, and the degradation of the environment in the process. Locally, the environmental problems range from lack of dumping sites, lack of drainage systems, deforestation, and the use of rivers as dumping sites and toilet outlets. Unclear land-tenure arrangements in informal settlements interfere with infrastructure building and repair, because pipes cannot be laid or repaired without first settling land disputes and possibly removing/destroying illegal constructions on public land or existing pipes.

The solutions are community empowerment regarding the environmental issues, monitoring systems and high penalties in the case of illegal constructions, demolition of dangerous and environmentally un-friendly infrastructure, and better waste management.

Mobility mapping – Mathare

Posted on | September 27, 2011 | No Comments

How do people negotiate the spaces in which they live? How are those spaces circumscribed differently according to social class? Which paths are the most traveled in our community and why? Does poverty influence mobility and in what ways? These are questions that I started thinking about during my work in Mathare and decided to do an experiment in mobility mapping.

Mobility mapping is a visual representation of people’s movements inside and outside their community (Tool Name: Mobility mapping, World Bank).

Some also call it “resource or asset mapping”. It is a tool that can be used to identify issues and problems related to a population’s mobility or lack thereof.

The Mathare participants that I worked with on the experiment understand that they are experts within their communities. They wanted to see how GPS technology could make visible their everyday movements, and what the information generated could tell them about their lives.

Each of them agreed to map his/her life for a week. The GPS unit was turned on at all times whenever the participants left their homes; their movements were tracked throughout the day. All of their interactions inside and outside the community were also mapped.

This project is ongoing, but some preliminary results (such as movement patterns) are already visible. For instance, the majority of movement occurs inside the slum, and is localized in the area where the individual resident comes from (see the picture above). Movements gravitate towards Eastleigh, which is a known commerce area adjacent to Mathare, and the City Center, where residents go to attend to administrative matters and enjoy entertainment.

The participants in this exercise even took the initiative to focus on specific professions: a garbage collection group, a water carrier, and even a Yoga teacher.

The main purpose of this exercise is to increase the informal settlement’s visibility. The participants and I hope that through mobility mapping, both Kenyan citizens and outsiders come to understand Mathare a little better.

ICT and the water sector: analysis of problems and community-driven solutions (Part 1)

Posted on | September 21, 2011 | No Comments

This is the re-post of the first in a series of blog posts I wrote for the World Bank’s Water Hackathon. As a consultant to the World Bank, I organized a series of community meetings to better understand how ICT can provide solutions to water problems in the informal settlements.

 

The Need for Community Meetings & Our Approach

We all need water – water is life. As Kofi Annan, former United Nations Secretary General, once phrased it: “Access to safe water is a fundamental human need and therefore a basic human right. ”But how do these words echo in the informal settlements of Africa, if at all?

Cities in Africa are having a difficult time coping with the influx of people arriving every day. Informal settlements are growing, and governments are struggling to provide even the most fundamental services, like access to clean water, to their urban populations.

Poverty, population increase, environmental degradation, corruption, lack of security and information all lead to, as one resident of Nairobi’s Kibera (one of Africa’s biggest slums) put it, “survival tactics. ” These “survival tactics” engulf communities – water suppliers, buyers and sellers, cartels, the provincial administration and the government – leading them into a vicious cycle of under the table dealings, vandalism, lack of engagement by the water utility, threats, and price controls. These combine to cause a lack of safe water for the urban poor. For example, landlords hire youths to destroy public water connections to divert them to their plots, and cartels who control water-points block and destroy new pipes to maintain their monopoly in a specific area. Perverse outcomes are the result – the price for safe water is often 10 times higher for the poorest in the slums of Nairobi than it is in the wealthy sub-urban areas.

Is there a way out of these interlinked challenges? Is there a solution? We were particularly interested in how Information Communication Technology (ICT) can help solve water-related problems in informal settlements. The use of technology such as internet and mobile phones is on the rise in Africa, and especially in Kenya. Nairobi, Kenya’s capital, has become a technology hot spot attracting researchers, developers and entrepreneurs from all over the world. At the same time, there is a big divide between different cross-sections of Kenyan society. The marginalized populations that live in informal settlements are not at the center of this technological boom, and some of the technological solutions which might make sense to the outsider do not make much sense in these communities.

Thus, to obtain a better understanding of possible ICT solutions in the water sector, we did an in-depth analysis of problems and community needs in two of the biggest slums in Nairobi. We organized two community forums, one in Kibera and one in Mathare, which are Kenya’s biggest and second biggest slum respectively. In each community members were given the opportunity to outline problems and potential solutions. The Mathare meeting had a stronger focus on the participation of local community members and leaders, while the Kibera forum focused on relevant NGOs (though a mix of both groups was present in each case). Representatives of Nairobi City Water and Sewerage Corporation, the main water utility, were present at both meetings. This has give us a nuanced understanding of the experiences of people on the ground as well as the issues faced by organizations attempting to bringwater and sanitation to the urban poor and the tools that may be useful to them. Between the two forums, our goal was to understand the complex set of water-related issues faced in each community and if and how the use of ICT could help solve some of the water-related problems.

More coming soon!

3D Mathare

Posted on | September 14, 2011 | 2 Comments

3D city models have many purposes ranging from urban planning, simulation, navigation systems, modeling, change detection, etc. They are in general used to visualize reality. The slums especially lie in the geographically (and otherwise) challenging areas and a 3D model could help with understanding some of the challenges people there face.

The idea was first presented to me by a friend, an architect Tomas Chapman, who runs a very interesting project in Johannesburg, South Africa, called Backdoors to the City (here’s an article which explains it well). He saw the building extraction that we did in Mathare and suggested that we build a 3D model. He explained me the basic principles and introduced me to Google SketchUp.

Another friend and architect April Hiebert liked the idea and decided to help work on it. She and her husband Dale Zak came to Mathare (Dale was at the time working for Ushahidi in Nairobi) to see the area and get a rough idea of how the place looks. We decided to estimate building and area heights from the satellite imagery, and complement this data with some basic measurements from the field. April then used Google SketchUp to draw the basic 3D model.

There’s still some work to be done on the model and I already have some ideas on how to use it further (I’m saving that for another blog post). In the meantime, below are some screenshots of the 3D model of Mathare.

 

Engaging Community Stakeholders

Posted on | September 10, 2011 | No Comments

This is a short follow-up on the blog post which I posted couple of months ago titled Doing the other 90% in Kibera. In the post I talked about the possible strategy of the Map Kibera Trust: “The Trust’s role will be a steady supplier of information and the communities, NGO’s, government etc. the implementer of activities”. Stakeholder involvement is crucial to ensure that the data is useful!

Since then we’ve met several stakeholders who have expressed interest in collaborating with the Trust. Two of them were Water and Sanitation for the Urban Poor (WSUP) and Kenya Water for Health Organization (KWAHO). We held couple of meetings to determine the content to be collected, conducted several field visits and eventually mapped the facilities and collected the information required by both organizations.

Under my mentorship, Zach – one of the mappers at the Trust – then created two maps for WSUP and a map for KWAHO. We also provided a file (an excel spreadsheet) with all the information collected.

I still believe that the Trust’s role should be the information supplier – sort of an information center within the community, and in working with KWAHO and WSUP I see a lot of potential to not only make our maps accessible to community members, but also to the organizations that are working on specific areas to improve the community.

In the past year my colleague Jamie and I have been refining our model and approach to improve upon the organization’s approach to community involvement and interactions. We’ve come a long way, and our experiences with WSUP and KWAHO demonstrate the potential for this approach.

Pictures from work

Posted on | August 31, 2011 | No Comments

I realize that sometimes words are not sufficient to describe the elaborate mapping projects. For this reason I posted a bunch of pictures on Flickr – and will keep adding more – with a hope to bring in the human face of the projects.

Click on the image:

Paper Mapping

Posted on | July 4, 2011 | No Comments

The approaches to paper mapping are well described by Mikel in his blog post called Paper Mapping in Community Meetings. What I would like to add to his points are the reasons why we conducted the paper mapping in the first place. To name a few:

Feedback. To acquire feedback from the wider community regarding the maps and the data collected by a few community members.

Understanding the place. To understand the areas where we are mapping – more accurately, to at least trying to understand complex places like Kibera. Outsiders to communities often overlook this step, and end up conducting projects in communities that they don’t really understand and haven’t taken the time to learn much about.

Acquire more information. We wanted to collect more information and double-check the information collected, find the missing objects, listen to the stories regarding particular issues, and to identify specific problems and solutions to these problems.

Monitoring the accuracy of the mapping. Through community’s input we were able to monitor the accuracy of our mapping endeavor.

These were the reasons I decided I’m going to look closely into these paper/drawn maps and try to understand what the people from Kibera were telling us. I’ve done a similar exercise before with Joshua Goldstein (as a part of Map Kibera) who was at that time working for UNICEF Innovations. We – together with the rest of the Map Kibera team, of course – had created the first, and the most comprehensive Security map of Kibera. Now it was time to focus on other problematic areas, where we also involved community members who drew on our existing map to add information and new issues. For that reason, there were, and still are, some twenty or so drawn, paper maps stored safely away in cyberspace, which cover issue topics ranging from education, health, water and sanitation. To extract useful information from these maps required some Photoshop magic. The first maps I looked into were the water and sanitation maps.

So what did we ask, and what did the community tell us?

Identifying missing resources:

Is it representative?Is anything missing or mislabeled?” were some of the questions we asked to help us see the extent of the missing data. The feedback made us realize that we missed a lot, and it made us realize we need to re-do the mapping.

Identifying problem areas:

What and where are the biggest problems regarding water and sanitation in the community? Which water points and toilets would you say are the worst and why? Are there many people who use public spaces for toilets?” were the questions which helped us identify the most pressing issues and problems. Some of the major problems identified were:

• All streams are used as toilets and dumping sites
• There is a health hazard because the people at times use the railway as a toilet, garbage dump & a cooking point
• Misuse of the drainage system as a dumping site

Stories behind issues:

What would you say are the largest and most direct challenges to providing quality water and sanitation? What is the biggest need regarding water, waste disposal, and sanitation in Kibera? What would you want the Government and other decision makers to know about water, waste disposal, and sanitation in Kibera?” These questions helped us collect stories that lent insight into the complex dynamics of Kibera. Some stories:

• Different amounts of money is required depending on which toilet you use
• Solid waste management is poor
• Vigilante groups demand money for the toilets which are to be constructed in their area
• Maintenance of toilets is a big problem; toilets get polluted quickly
• For “short calls” people use plastic tins; flying toilets (plastic bags in which people defecate and then throw out of their home) are used at night because of insecurity
• Households use paper bags for waste collection; these bags are then picked up by individuals and groups who bring them to collection points for a certain amount

Mapping mobility:

Where do your collect water? Where do you use the toilet? Where do you dump trash? Why?” By asking these questions we were able to observe the movements connected to the water and sanitation. Some of the findings that came out of the mobility mapping were that:

• People dump their trash into rivers, and the rivers serve as collectors of most of the garbage from the slums
• There are some points of data collection within the slum where the city council collects the trash and transports it out of the slum
• People don’t necessarily use the closest toilets and water points but look for the most affordable ones

Solutions:

How would you solve some of the problems you pointed out? In what ways can you envision using this map to improve water, waste disposal, and sanitation in Kibera?” These questions encouraged people to share their views on how to solve certain problems regarding water and sanitation:

• Awareness and education
• Need for weekly garbage collection
• More dumping sites, more toilets to be constructed
• Stakeholder involvement – coordination between stakeholders
• Partnership involvement – CBOs, NGOs, and landlords should come on board to make sure that each plot has a sanitary facility/usable toilet
• Triangle: Reuse, Recycle, Reduction programs needed

Paper mapping or drawing exercises proved to be a very useful feedback mechanism and also a very useful tool for planning. The community’s knowledge is priceless and only the community understands and knows all the answers. There’s no point in figuring out something new when the solutions are already available and when all you have to do is just listen!

What we learned out of this process can be best told by quoting an article: Participatory mapping and geographic information systems: Whose map? Who is empowered and who dis-empowered? Who gains and who loses? by professor Robert Chambers from the Institute of Development Studies who has been involved with participatory methodologies from the early beginnings, or at least from the first modern scientific endeavors in the field of participatory methodologies:

Before the late 1980s and early 1990s when some of us were so excited at what we were finding local people could do, much indigenous, local and participatory mapping had already taken place in different regions, countries and continents. Mapping and various forms of spatial representation by local people on their own have a long history, and very likely a prehistory!

More remarkable than what local people had already done in mapping and other forms of spatial representation was “our” educated professional ignorance of their mapping abilities.

Doing the other 90% in Kibera

Posted on | May 31, 2011 | 8 Comments

A lot of ink has been spilled writing about how technology is only 10% and all the other stuff you have to do to make the project successful is 90%. These two posts talk in detail about the issue: Allocation of time: Deploying Ushahidi and Why technology is 10%. Nowadays we all agree that this is true so I’m not going to add my two cents to this discussion. What I want to write about is how Map Kibera Trust (the Trust from now on) plans to start doing the 90% in Kibera.

Let me first paint a picture of the situation at the Trust at the moment. The Trust has around 20 on and off members, who were trained in basic GPS and OSM techniques, video editing and Ushahidi platform. Because of this there’s loads of information that exists mostly in cyberspace. We believed – and it was an honest belief – that if we opened up information, people would make good use of it. But apart from a small number of individuals, mostly foreign, that have used the data for their academic research, the data stayed untouched.

The problem was that we did things the wrong way. We collected information first and then started asking people if they need it. Our approach was supply driven instead of demand driven which was nicely pointed out to us by an independent IDS research: Mediating Voices. Because of this we have now backtracked to make a new action plan for community engagement.

The question we asked ourselves is: “Now what?”

The answer is not simple and to at least start working on it Kepha and I sat down over coffee, wrote DATA on the middle of a piece of paper and asked ourselves: “What’s next?” In a short brainstorming session we came up with a general plan of community engagement in Kibera. What we realized was that the Trust is going to need help. And the help needs to come from within Kibera, from the people living and working in the community.

We decided we will start by networking and organizing community meetings at which we will present the information collected so far. At these meetings we will organize so called “peoples committees”, each representing different issues.

I will explain the work of these committees with an example concerning education:

As I said, Kepha and I started with the word “data” at the beginning of our brainstorming exercise, which is obviously not the best way to start. But making the best of the current situation, we decided that through community meetings, networking, and presentation of our maps and database of educational facilities, we will organize an “education committee”. The committee will have two branches or types of members – Trust members and Stakeholders.

The Trust members will be the link between the stakeholders and the community. Their role will be to collect and supply the information, analyze and advocate for better and new ways of information usage. We see the Trust more as a supplier of information than an implementor or the end user of this information.

Collected information will end up in the hands of the second branch consisting of community members, NGOs, local administration, private sector, legal institutions etc. Their role will be to act upon this information by writing action plans, proposition statements, determining what kind of projects should be undertaken next, involvement of government representatives and lobbying for better service provisions in Kibera or other activities.

This will be a mutual partnership between the Trust and different types of communities in Kibera. The Trust’s role will be a steady supplier of information and the communities the implementer of activities. Of course this is just a general idea but we hope it will get something rolling.

So will the people want to be a part of something like that?

I believe the answer is Yes! I’ve seen people excited when they saw the data, the maps, and the videos. Organizations need information – facts – in order to do their work or to address certain issues. I’ve seen people talking at community meetings, contemplating how to use the data to plan activities or who to engage when information was presented to them in an understandable manner. In Mathare, where we began by talking about data to community groups, we found a large demand for data by community leaders, and groups. It’s something about having facts, a proof, in your hands that makes you fill with possibilities, with hope that you can actually do something and move from just talking about things to actively doing them. For once I’m optimistic.

keep looking »

Recently written

• Wongonyi and the first map from scratch
• Mwananyamala
• ICT and the water sector: Water problems in Kibera and Mathare slums
• Mobility mapping – Mathare
• ICT and the water sector: analysis of problems and community-driven solutions (Part 1)

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3D model Base Map Committees Doing the 90% ground truthing Health Kibera Kibera News Network Map Kibera Map Kibera Trust Map Mathare mapping Mathare Mobility mapping Mount Elgon National Democratic Institute Paper Mapping Participatory Mapping Random Occurences Reflections Sanitation Stakeholder involvement Taita Hills United Nations Video Voice of Kibera Voice of Mathare Water Water Hackathon Weekly Diary Wongonyi World Bank

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