Saturday 8 November 2008

6 a.m. and 6 p.m. in Nairobi: Obama’s and John’s Victories

Dateline Nairobi: 6 a.m. Wednesday 5th November 2008 found me awake, hearing Obama’s victory speech in tears of joy. 6 p.m. that same day found me again in tears in Kibera, Africa’s largest slum of a million inhabitants, hearing John’s story of how he, a 23 year old ‘general’ commanded 200 youths with pangas (machetes) to destroy Toi market after the December 2007 Kenyan elections. The tears came, not about the destruction, but from John’s heart rending account of how he and the youths worked with Jami Bora Trust to rebuild the market, create a new future on ‘the other side’ of violence. Two victories by two sons of Kenya, both descendants of the Luo tribe from the shores of Lake Victoria, both given opportunities, both being more than a tribe or a race, both making a difference to the world.

You might ask how John’s victory could be compared with Obama’s. As I videoed his testimony I heard how John and his gang razed Toi Market, a site for 1,700 traders of foodstuffs, household goods and small workshops to serve Kibera’s million. After wrecking the place and declaring it a ‘no go’ area for others than Luos and Nubians (people from Sudan settled in Kibara by the British before Kenyan independence), they met with Andrew, the manager of Jami Bora Trust, agreed to give up their battleground, to rebuild their market, to hand in their pangas for tools to make iron storage boxes and jikos, charcoal stoves. How did Andrew, a medic and resident of Kibera, win their confidence when John and his gang had scared off armed police and the District Commissioner? Andrew with only himself and his organisation, the Jami Bora Trust?

How has Jami Bora succeeded in some of the worst conditions in urban Africa? How have former beggars, thieves and hooligans become microfinance members, loan officers, business coaches, market rebuilders, a phoenix rising from the ashes? ‘Jami Bora’ means ‘Good Families’ in Kiswahili and its microfinance credit system, housing, training and health insurance serves 200,000 in Kenya, aiming to reach half a million by the end of 2010. How has it been so successful since Ingrid Munroe and the ‘Mamas’, the beggars from Kibera founded it in 1999? Ingrid, a Swedish former UN worker past retirement age and married to a Canadian, first came to Kenya in 1985 to organise the UN Year of Shelter and stayed. At retirement time, the ‘Mamas’ of Kibera told her, ‘Mama, you can’t leave us. Let’s work together.’

So they have created a miracle when other projects with huge donor funds have failed to make a dent in Kibera’s poverty. Their housing project and new town, 40 kilometers from Kibera, due to be populated by 2,000 former beggar families in January 2009, is being built at 10% of the cost of the nearby UN Habitat programme. Owners of the houses will pay 3000 Kenyan Shillings per month, about $50, gradually increasing monthly payments over 20 years to be full owners. Their town will have a market, a wetlands sewerage system of a series of ponds ending with waste water clean enough for the gardens by each house, workshops for trained people, its own school. Jami Bora won a three year court battle with locals, not wanting former beggars as neighbours. Losers of the court cases will be winners, the customers for Jami Bora’s thriving businesses. Two other projects are already underway for housing, cost efficient because the future owners make as many of the housing components themselves, rows upon rows of concrete blocks, stockpiling until it’s time to build.

Jami Bora has created this miracle through local ownership, local initiatives and local people. Ingrid has put the success of her street-wise system down to her education from her three adopted sons, three former street children, and then all of the former beggars as members and staff knowing by instinct what to do.
We didn’t have to think about how to rebuild Toi Market, we knew we had to include the people who burnt it down, include them as part of the process to create something to benefit everyone. Jami Bora’s strength is the different ethnic groups in our management teams. That’s why we never broke down on tribal grounds in the crisis. My strength is because I don’t belong to any tribe.


Ingrid and her husband, no ordinary ex-patriates in Kenya, have five children, four adopted and one ‘home grown’. The three youngest were street children from Kibera, brothers subjected to cruelties beyond belief. The middle one was in jail for four years from the age of four to eight, the elder maimed from being run over by a truck, the last one had no language before coming to the Munroes. They are now in their 20s, two with their own families in Kenya, the third studying in Sweden.
I learned beggar mentality from the three boys who spoke only Sheng, a slang of English and Kiswahili, when they came to us. As they learned English and Kiswahili, we could follow what happened to them. The trust between the beggars and me was based on the boys and the street mothers who showed solidarity with the street children, even though they weren’t their own. The one in prison from the age of four to eight bottled everything up for a year and a half, then had nightmares for six months. My husband and I took turns with him.


This quiet woman also told of how her eldest adopted son, had to leave first the International, then the British school in Nairobi, socially shunned by ‘do gooder’ ex-pat families once they found out he was an ex-street child, finally finding a home in the Swedish school, the first time the three felt they were not different.

Ingrid’s sons educated her instincts, guiding her to draw her microfinance credit programme members from the beggars, starting with a loan for as little as $5. This $5 for a bag of charcoal enabled a beggar over time to become today a charcoal wholesaler. I met members in Jami Bora’s busy Kibera branch by the rebuilt Toi Market making savings deposits, a requirement for qualifying for a loan. Others were making out loan applications accompanied by a member of their five-person group that guarantees loan pay-back. A loan officer and former beggar himself explained:
This is no easy credit system here. If they want to borrow Kenyan Shillings 10,000, they first have to save 5,000 and belong to a group. We visit their businesses. They have a plan. They bring a guarantor.


Jami Bora cuts its costs of doing small loans by using the latest technology, Point of Sale machines that print out receipts immediately to savers and borrowers. In the beginning they solved problems of payment defaults with a study that revealed slow payments were often due to costs of medical emergencies. With Jami Bora’s ‘can do’ attitude they invented a low-cost, self-sustaining health insurance scheme, costing less than $25 per year for a member and four children under the age of 18.
We have made it up as we went along, using street people, former beggars. We have found our best social workers from those who took the longest to develop, the biggest back sliders, the ones with the most excuses. They wind up being the best coaches.

This brings us full circle to John’s victory in parallel to Obama’s, rebuilding Toi Market. John and Bernard, his deputy, told me how they transformed from hard bitten thugs to micro entrepreneurs, coming to the ‘other side’ after flattening the market. Bernard said, ‘We carried pangas. If John told me to cut you, I’d do it without thinking. I’d just do it.’ John added, ‘You can’t imagine the force of 200 youths, beating away armed police and the District Commissioner.’ When asked what had turned things around both John and Bernard pointed to Andrew, Jami Bora’s branch manager:
He’s the one. He talked to us, convinced us this market was for everyone, Luos, Nubians, Kikuyus, we all need to make a living. They started by giving us maize for a day’s work, then 500 shillings [$6] a day, we built 500 stalls in three weeks, people got back to work. We couldn’t believe they weren’t punishing us, they gave us a chance. They gave us an emergency loan, then training. We now make metal boxes and charcoal stoves. We had been idlers, along with the prostitutes and other lay abouts, we had nothing at stake.


They ushered me to their workshops, showed me their products: brightly painted blue metal boxes for storing clothes, water tight for the flimsy Kibera shacks and jikos, charcoal-burning stoves. They hammered metal for the video, proud of the noise of making rather than destroying, opened the doors to their lock-up storage, counting the shiny metal boxes ready for painting, the jikos lined up for the next step of production. Andrew, other Jami Bora staff, John, Bernard and others took me to the seventh story of the building surrounded by the Toi Market, pointing to the new roofs of the 1,900 stalls built: 1700 to replace the burnt ones, 200 for John’s youths.
People come from other areas at the weekends to buy fresh cabbages, other things here, not just Kibera people. They know they can get fresh. You should see the rich cars.


By then it was dusk, seven p.m., kerosene and electric lights lit, smoke rising from the shanties as we looked over the shiny new roofs of the Toi Market stalls, took photos. They pointed out vehicles in the scrap yard below: ‘You throw these away in your country. Here we try to make them run again.’ Earlier they had posed in front of their blue homemade boxes, holding up a photo of Obama and my bag that says, ‘What are you grateful for?’ John looked over the shiny roofs from the seventh floor vantage point, looked at Andrew and said, ‘It’s better than before.’

Sunday 2 November 2008

Sisters of Justice

We took a bit of ugali, a maize cake with our right hands, pushing bits of stew and kale into it, enjoying the typical Kenyan food and way of eating. ‘It’s sweeter like this’, Martha had said and I agreed, eating with her and her husband Koome, as we laughed about the day’s events. Kawe, their daughter and I had enjoyed a day’s visit to the Safari Walk, Nairobi’s zoo with raised walkways for viewing rescued animals, glad to be welcomed by her parents Martha and Koome, eating ugali, getting to know one another, and were soon joined by three extended family members. Koome took the younger ones to the front room while Martha, Pamela and I ate and talked.

These warm Kenyan women are each extraordinary, Martha one of 50 High Court Judges and responsible for a district with eight million inhabitants in Kenya’s Rift Valley, and Pamela one of 22 Electoral Commissioners. Pamela had landed in the hot seat, just one month before the December 2007 elections leading to the January political turmoil, upsetting Kenya’s previous peaceful image. They explained that the chaos, although on the surface tribally based, went beyond tribal issues, and came down to land rights. Members of the majority tribe, the Kikuyus, had moved from the central province to buy farmland in the Rift Valley, living peacefully until seemingly orchestrated unrest erupted in January. We were unable to resolve the tangled issues over our ugali, and we soon got to the fundamental issues of land rights. ‘We won’t have equality for women until we get land rights sorted’, Martha pointed out. ‘We have a tangled mess. Every five years there’s a Land Commission that makes an enquiry, then it’s put on a shelf and collects dust until the next one comes along. We need to take those enquiries off the shelf and get down to it.’

She gave an example of how a recent case pointed out injustice to women. A father decided to dispossess his two daughters, giving land to the sons. The two women took their father to court, and Marttha dispensed justice by looking at old legislation going back to colonial days: ‘Anyone living and using land is the owner as long as they are using the land’. She pointed out that the daughters had been living and using the land until the father decided to throw them off, an illegal act. ‘These women had taken their father to court, how many others do not have the capacity to do that?’ she stated. Both Martha and Pamela agreed that women, who often do the bulk of the work tilling crops, often get a raw deal when it comes to inheritance. Furthermore, land ownership disputes often stop Kenyan development, old issues left unresolved that stop progress.
I had previously asked if there were any way that Advocates for International Development, a UK not-for-profit offering pro bono legal work could be of service. They heartily agreed that land rights were a prime area to start with. Also, the Minister of Justice’s recently launched Legal Aid scheme could benefit from partnering with local chambers to build capacity through guidelines and sharing information, developing materials to help people understand their rights, simplifying procedures. As Martha said, ‘That would help judges a great deal, people could arrive in court with full knowledge of their rights and seeking protection. When they have a clear idea of their rights, it makes it much easier for us.’ She explained how the partnership between the Rift Valley and Newcastle Law Societies had established a secretariat for children in need of legal assistance. The Rift Valley Law Society developed the programme to assist under 18 year olds, many vulnerable due to the HIV-AIDs pandemic. The result is access and improved quality of justice through the pro bono work of 250 Rift Valley Law Society members, the training organised by Newcastle Law Society and exchange visits between Rift Valley and Newcastle lawyers, staying in each others’ homes and sharing expertise.

We agreed to find ways to put A4ID and the Kenya’s Justice Department together by my meeting the Minister of Justice, another powerful woman and a next door neighbour. The ugali, stew and kale finished, we sisters of justice cleansed our hands, content with sharing our meal and connections to improve women’s and ultimately everyone’s rights through land rights.

Silence in Nairobi

Coming from the centre of London with an occasional pigeon nibbling at my window box plants, an odd sea gull squawking in the spaces between the Georgian rooftops and the Paris-like buildings to the dawn chorus in a Nairobi suburb brought me back decades to my US Peace Corps volunteer days in Kenya, a teacher at a boys' secondary school in the bush. The gardener sweeping outside, the swish swish of morning ritual, sweeping away the night before, the dead leaves of the past, the rhythm of greeting a new day. As I struggled to adjust to the three hour change, London to Nairobi, realising it was still 4.30 in the old place I took time to move into this new zone, this new sound scape.

Swahili outside my door, voices a garden or two over, the birds another layer of soft, sometimes strident fussing, buckets being filled and placed for mopping, metal handle clanging. I stepped into a world of morning chores, birds and people doing their things of life, this All Souls or is it All Saints Day? My airplane was my broomstick for the Halloween or All hallows flight, the day to scare away the ghosts by playing with them, dressing up as them. I had sat between two young men, one on a project to vaccinate 100,000 Masai cattle, the other to check on and then create new water filtration systems using sand in a series of pools in Northern Kenya on the border with Somalia, eight hours then eight hours drive more. I told my story of working with microfinance, recalling my mission to find out about best practice in Kenya, explore in Tanzania for partners to work with, listen for opportunities to use our people from London with improving the performance of the microfinance institutions, these ‘banks for the poor’.

After the visa line and paying my fifty dollars to pass go, easy baggage claim I was met by Kagwiria or ‘Kawe’, a former intern for our work with the UK National Committee of 2005 UN Year of Microcredit, and her neighbour Joe, a student. As we drove the 30 minutes from one end of Nairobi to another we talked about the economic and political situation. Here politics seem closer to life, especially after the turmoil that followed the late 2007 election. On one side of Nairobi people were cheering and partying the result of the old being defeated, the new about to come in, on another the riots, seemingly planned and coordinated to happen, were starting. No one had nightmared that so much unleashed violence could turn the ‘darling, the success story’ of East Africa into festering sores bursting and spewing their infections, killing and displacing people, only now ten months later having the confidence to return home. Peace, relative prosperity and pride gone in an instant, the mighty fallen from their political perches, just as it happens in so many other places, Kenyans in the UK telling me ashamedly that the unrest had been festering underneath, now that the boil had been lanced, it was time to let the wound heal, to tackle the infection where it had started.

Kawe and I talked late into the night over my supper of home cooked stew, rice and salad, bringing me down to earth again. At 26 she’s working with a consultancy that assists Microfinance Institutions to transform into Microfinance banks, as part of a team taking them through a two-year process to get their accounting, human resources, legal systems in order to get approval to act as a bank. This costs about £400,000, a hefty sum given by international donors, to become ‘Microfinance Depositing Taking Institutions’. Then there is the added cost of implementing all the systems, training the staff in the institution. You might ask, ‘Why are they going through this? Why not simply stay as a plain vanilla Microfinance Institution? Aren’t they able to do enough for the poor by giving them credit?’


The answer is that most poor people surveyed say they want a safe place for their savings, not just small loans. We in ‘Northern’ countries are used to banking services, take them as a necessary part of life, even though we’re now braying at the moon about the collapse of credit, this ‘credit crunch’, this unprecedented downturn. We’re scratching our heads, wondering why it took us so long to see we’d get caught by our habits of overspending, our belief in up and not down for prices. In the meantime, poor people with very little access to financial services are asking for a place to save, a microinsurance policy to cover their cow or against drought, a small loan with short term pay back, and if they’re really lucky, a cheaper system for transferring or receiving money from relatives abroad. We were overglutted, still are, with credit card offerings, 0% loans for TVs with three years to pay, offers to spend, spend, spend as if there were no tomorrow. That was until shares started dropping in price, banks going to the government for bail outs, the inter-bank lending stopping because of lack of confidence in the system.

Here is the contrast in the silence. Many of us with so much noise about our consumer lives and our busyness find it hard to hear anything else or to access the silence underneath it all, the real thing that underlies our being. Sometimes it takes a jolt, a metaphorical slap in the face for us to wake up to what is really important.

On the London to Nairobi flight to my left was the German living in Scotland whose team’s mission is to vaccinate 100,000 cattle belonging to Masai, their cattle their lifeline. On my right, the engineer from Mississippi with his team’s project to increase the number of water filtration systems so people on the edge in northern Kenya could start to make the connection between pure water and health. Seated in the middle, with the mission of microfinance, sensible credit, savings, insurance and money transfer as one of the ways for people to take slow and sure steps out of poverty, getting access to planning for their futures. Seems as if the three of us in our three seats had fairly sensible goals for our missions to East Africa, seeking to access a silence underlying it all, an eternal silence of sharing in the pool of existence and access to life worthwhile. I listen to the birds, the sweeping and mopping with their own song notes, the wind brushing the leaves, the silence underneath it all.