Tag: Community Development

  • Project Planning (Video)

    Project planning is essential for successful implementation of activities. Get it right and the project runs like a well-oiled machine. Mess it up, and the outputs of the project could be jeopardized. We recently held a project planning meeting in Mathare and thought to make a video. The aim of this particular project was to collect…

  • Countering Violent Extremism: A Perceptions Mapping Study

    Building Resilience in Civil Society (BRICS) runs a Regional Countering Violent Extremism Research Unit (RRU) in East Africa. BRICS was commissioned to conduct in-depth research designed to determine the local context of violent extremism. The research is based in North Eastern Kenya, Coastal Kenya and Tanzania, and Central and Eastern Uganda. The purpose of area-based…

  • Men’s and Women’s Perceptions of Safety Related to Mobility in Informal Settlement

    How are spaces in informal settlements traversed differently according to gender? Which paths are the most travelled in a community, when and why? Does gender influence perceptions of safety when it comes to movements within the informal settlement? These are some of the questions we wanted to answer during participatory mapping to support Kenya Informal…

  • Mobility of Men and Women in Informal Settlement Related to Seeking Opportunities

    How do people navigate the places in which they live? Does gender influence mobility and in what way? How do men and women access opportunities within and outside the slum? These are some of the questions we wanted to answer during participatory mapping to support Kenya Informal Settlement Improvement Project (KISIP) in Soweto Kayole. During…

  • Linking Perceptions of Safety to Infrastructural Upgrading in Informal Settlements

    Spatial Collective was hired in the spring of 2016 to develop a Geographic Information Systems-based participatory mapping approach to support Kenya Informal Settlement Improvement Project (KISIP) in developing settlement specific designs aimed at linking perceptions of safety to infrastructural upgrading in informal settlements. The project was implemented in Kayole Soweto, in collaboration with The World…

  • The Power of Community Mapping and Community Data

    In June 2016, ten youth from Mathare digitized more than a thousand structures in Kayole Soweto, creating a building footprint of the area. At the same time, twenty community members from Soweto, mapped several hundreds of amenities including hospitals, clinics, pharmacies, schools, security lights, religious institutions, bars, government offices, etc. In just one week, under…

  • Community Land Mapping – Post Fieldwork Data Management and Map Creation

    The final step in community land mapping in Tana River County was to design the maps of the two targeted communities. Previous steps are described here, here and here. To complete the two maps we used data collected from the field, including GPS files of points and tracks, two drawings made by community members of their community…

  • Field work in Tana River

    After the initial three day hands-on training and a community forum, it was time to hit the field. As noted in the previous blog posts (here and here), the targeted communities were Chana and Handaraku in Tana River County. We had very little knowledge of the area prior to going to the field, so we…

  • Start of Community Land Mapping in Tana River: Forum

    This is a follow up on the previous post. We began our field work on mapping community land by holding a large forum with the representatives of Chana and Handaraku communities, the two communities in Tana River County targeted in this mapping exercise. Community Land Rights Mobilizers and other selected community representatives were invited to participate…

  • Mapping Community Land in Tana River

    We are currently in Tana River supporting the work of Kenya Land Alliance (KLA) and their partners Namati and Oxfam in using mapping and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) tools in their efforts to help communities protect their customary and indigenous land. We are building on the work that these organizations have already completed in Tana…