Category: Reflections
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Mwananyamala
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,…
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ICT and the water sector: Water problems in Kibera and Mathare slums
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…
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ICT and the water sector: analysis of problems and community-driven solutions (Part 1)
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…
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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…
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Pictures from work
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:
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Doing the other 90% in Kibera
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…
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Why Map Open Drainage? And How?
I believe that the reasons to map open drainage in the slums are well known and are obvious to most people. Everyone who’s ever been to the slums knows that open drainage presents a huge health hazard to the people living around it. In combination with poor or non-existent water and sanitation systems, open drainage…