Map Kibera

This post by our member Steve Banner, of Kibera News Network (originally posted on the Voice of Kibera) explains how rumours resulted in violence during the recent party candidate nominations in January. A distinct mistrust of official channels of information is evident: if no one knows what to believe, suspicion and anger are quick to arise. This is one reason that Map Kibera is working to build accurate and trusted local networks of information in Nairobi slums during the upcoming elections.

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Destruction of Red Rose School, Kibera. Photo by Lee Ibrahim.

Kibera street political analysts, as I may call them, and rumour mongers, have a very thin line separating them if the happenings of the past few days is anything to go by.

After fierce campaigns on 6th and 7th January, the ODM nominations were to take place on 18th. The 18th came and people went to vote in one peace each confident that his or her candidate will clinch the party ticket.

After a full day of voting, rumours took over and went round on Friday 19th that the ODM Sarangombe county representative ticket had gone to Mr. Owino Ko’tieno, this was later to be confirmed by the returning officer at olympic primary school polling station.

The same rumours claimed that Mr. Amayo, a Kibra MP contestant had clinched the ODM ticket, hours later the same rumours reversed their claim that the confirmed winner was Mr. Ken Okoth. I never got to know how the confirmation came about and never bothered to ask since one didn’t actually need to ask, they would tell it to you anyway.

So I came to believe it when a friend told me that Mr. Ken Okoth had actually updated on social media that he had clinched the ODM ticket to run for Kibra MP.

It was at this point that the street political analysts of Kibera picked the story, and by saying street political analysts, I mean those individuals who stand by the roadside especially at newspapers vending points with a handful crowd around them, as they analyze the political situation of the moment. Try walking at olympic or kamkunji grounds, Kibera on a Sunday and you can’t miss them.

On this day, they took to analyze the possibility of Mr. Ken Okoth winning and how he had done it. According to one such analyst, Mr. Ken Okoth had only won in 2 polling stations and therefore could not be declared the winner. He argued that laini saba area residents had not been allowed to vote, and the area, according to him, was an Amayo stronghold.

As the rumour picked the story and went round with it, breaking it down in different versions, it seemed a group of youths decided to react to the rumour and marched to orange house in kilimani area, which houses ODM headquaters, to allegedly protest over why laini saba residents were denied a chance to participate in the nominations, where they were reported to have engaged in property destruction.

And despite the ODM electoral board announcing on a press conference that no certificate had been issued to any candidate yet, a rumour still went round that Mr. Owino Ko’tieno, who had been announced the winner of county rep. ODM ticket, had been denied the certificate, and, according to the rumour, given to Mr. Kajwang, who was also contesting for county representative ODM ticket in sarangombe. It’s believed that this could have been the reason for the rowdiness that followed thereafter that led to youths engaging in property destruction at Redrose school in olympic, a school that is believed to be owned by Mr. Ken Okoth, who, according to random sources in Kibera, was being accused of working to make sure Mr. Owino Kotieno did not have the certificate. There were several versions of this story depending on who you ask, and which side he/she supported and the mood on the ground. In one particular version, Mr. Ken Okoth is alleged to have been asked who he wanted to work with and mentioned Kajwang instead of Kotieno, but I could never tell who to believe among the several story tellers I listened to.

And even after ODM board made it clear that no certificate had been issued, the youths went ahead to lay barricades along Kibera drive near olympic stage.

Moments later, police from the general service unit were deployed to quell the lawlessness and violence. Running battles ensued, leaving scores of people injured among them 2 journalists from the mainstream media.

Map Kibera Trust has been a bee-hive of activities lately! Despite the social context changing drastically due to a general security decline in Nairobi – the fear of bombs and terrorist attacks — as well as the fast buildup of election activities in Kibera, Mathare and Mukuru, our teams have done a lot to reach out to the community and meet our various objectives using our digital platforms.

In Kibera, we have among other things succeeded in conducting a re-mapping of Kibera, activated existing community networks through the community forums that we have organized, and enhanced dialogue with community leaders and representatives leading to better ideas and even new suggestions to strengthen our work. In November, we made the first major print-out of the edited maps and engaged in an elaborate map-distribution drive (see our detailed blog post) that saw us distribute 109 maps to 83 different institutions so far. We are already receiving great feedback that will help our planning for the next steps. KNN have continued making videos and posting them on their youtube channel. Voice of Kibera has intensified their community outreach to publicize the SMS line in order to improve submissions.

All three programmes have spent much time in Mukuru and Mathare helping pass skills to the teams in these locations and conducting in-house refresher trainings to prepare the teams for an elections related project sponsored by the United States Institute of Peace. All teams are now ready to engage in any kind of work. A modality of equipment sharing was devised in order for the other groups to get access to complete their work. Other than that, the USIP project implementation is on course and on schedule for Kibera, followed immediately by Mathare and Mukuru. The teams have completed elections boundary mapping in all the 3 locations and are currently engaged in the electoral points of interest mapping.

We have successfully set up project coordination points and project offices in Mathare and Mukuru which has improved coordination and is likely to enhance efficiency in the coordination of the projects.

Several in-house trainings have been conducted in all the 3 locations, Kibera especially benefitted from local partner organizations’ training curricular on subjects like journalism ethics and photography from Pawa254, a local organization and conducted sessions led by volunteer interns like Job Mwaura, who recently did a post-graduate academic study on Kibera News Network to be presented as a case study on Citizen Journalism. We have since agreed to expand these training opportunities to reach other teams in Mukuru and Mathare.

The organization as well participated in 3 major conferences and presented in 2 of them. Two Map Kibera Trust members attended and presented at the 7^th ESRI user conference that was organized by ESRI Eastern Africa and which took place in Naivasha in early October. Later in the same month Kibera’s Director attended the ON –Omidyar Network Baraza conference in Accra, Ghana.

Kepha Ngito speaking at the OpenUp12 conference in London, November 2012.

In early November, Map Kibera Trust was presented on a speakers’ panel at the Open Up 2012 conference in London organized by the Department of International Development, the WIRED magazine and Omidyar Network. These conferences brought together ICT experts and leaders from different parts of the world thus provided Map Kibera Trust a global opportunity for networking.

It’s worth mentioning that the intense activity in the period has exposed gaps that have threatened our work and hampered progress in a few ways. For instance, bureaucracy in accessing government structures and institutions for permission has been the main challenge forcing us to postpone activities that require specific legal permits. This item has taken more time to deliver on as anticipated mainly because we have spent and are still spending much time and effort scaling the bureaucracy to reach the relevant decision makers. We have however widened our networks through the various meetings and forums we have been conducting and even brought some of the decision makers on board. Again, with the changing dynamics of our socio-political context, we have realized the need to enhance our capacity to track changes, document and report them in good time.

Finally, we have seen the increasing need to enhance our community engagement strategy to facilitate the usage of the data and information that we distribute to the community by the community members. For example the perennial question of “what do we do with the maps?” still persist in the community and Map Kibera still needs to do much either in modeling strategy and obtaining resources to sustain the work already happening in the community.

An Attentive Audience at the Meet-up

Introduction:

“I want to play a pivotal role in updating and sharing community generated information with the community and the world at large through citizen journalism. I say so because I witnessed an incident a few months ago during the oil shortage problem, where a CNN journalist came to Kibera slums and paid a woman stage manage some kind or a demonstration saying the price of Paraffin had gone up as he recorded her. I would like to know more about www.voiceofkibera.org so that I can challenge the perceptions and misrepresentations that Kibera goes through.” This was what Ann one of the participants had to say during the introductions session at the meet-up.

Before then, Map Kibera Trusts’ Voice of Kibera had organized a presentation in Soweto East village to engage the youth group leaders more on how they can get engaged with the platform. Having invited 30 representatives, 22 were able to turn up for the event that started at about 2:15pm on Saturday the 1^st of December. 

Preparations for the day:

Adequate arrangements by the V.O.K team were made to ensure that the days program would run smoothly hence achieving its purpose. Below was the program flow.

• Introduction of the entire Map Kibera Trust and Voice of Kibera.
• The relationship between Map Kibera Trust programs.
• The Voice of Kibera platform and how it works, what the participants think can be improved.
• Question and Answer time to enable a brain storming session for better understanding.
• Distribution of Maps on 3 themes; Education, Health and security to the line organizations that attended.
• Refreshment and Networking
• Conclusion

The voice of Kibera Presentation:

This was a step by step presentation done with Fredrick, one of the Map Kibera trust members. I could feel the mood in the hall, one with silence meaning the participants were keenly taking in what was being said. Some of the details that were shared are; How to submit a report, The ways with which you can send the report to the website, the details and importance of categories, editing, proof reading and approving or reports among others.

Fredrick Doing the Presentation in Soweto East

After the session Sande took over to reinforce what had been discussed even as he led the question and answer time.

Some of the questions:

• How do you ensure authenticity of the reports you collect?
• Now that we have new boundaries, what is your organization doing to that effect?
• Do you have anywhere you advertise jobs for the youths in the slums?

 Our Response to the Questions:

That when you have a report and you are not sure about its’ contends, you can get call back the person who send it to get more clarification, if the news has been covered by a 2^nd or 3^rd parties you can use that as well as using your available networks to get confirmation or more information on the same. Map Kibera is currently remapping the new boundaries by IEBC including information on the location of polling stations so that this information can be available to the locals before the elections in March 2013. We are developing a plartform under the name organizational directory that will see advertisement of opportunities a reality in the sense that those who consume contend do it for free apart from profiling organizations in Kibera on the Platform.

The meet-up that took close to 3 hours came to an end with the p