Engaging Community Stakeholders

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.