Map Kibera

“Kibera’s people deserve to know the facts about their lives.” – Robert Neuwirth, Shadow Cities.

The excellent book Shadow Cities narrates a conversation the author had with a Kibera NGO officer who had overseen research into water pricing in Kibera. The ad-hoc system of water vendors and CBOs in Kibera led to water costing 5, 10, 20 times what a resident of nearby wealthy suburbs paid for municipal water. When asked for the reaction of Kibera residents to this news, the officer told him that he couldn’t possibly share this information with residents because there could be riots.

We strongly disagree that Kibera can’t handle truth. Unfortunately this was one of many research projects we heard about that produced reports about Kibera for other audiences, with disinterest to sharing the results even with Kiberans who helped organize the research. It’s unethical.

Map Kibera has received its fair share of research proposals, and have only so far worked with IDS. They shared our values for how research might best work in partnership with ‘practitioners’ (that’s us), and the proper position in the “Research-Practice Balance”. This post is a quick draft at pulling out principles that guide us in research, and hopefully can serve as a brief guide for other research projects that wish to work us, within Kibera, or within any ‘development context’.

Design in Partnership

For us, research is a partnership. We want a core role in the design of the research project, well before they shape of the research is finalized.

If you’re studying development, or designing some kind of technological intervention, you must at least talk to the subject of research well before submitting the proposal (amazingly this doesn’t happen). They will have very specific guidance on what will work, what won’t work, how your research will be better and more beneficial. It’s possible they don’t want to be studied, respect that choice.

With IDS, we met Evangelia last June, and have had a very strong dialogue throughout the entire process.

Contribute concretely to the research subject

Research, especially in Kibera, is often simply extractive. The researcher interviews, surveys, holds group discussions, and analyses the findings, and publishes in a journal. How did the subject benefit? And we’re talking more than simply sharing the results (though that’s important of course). How can a research intervention promote positive change? Yes, this is anathema to usual “objective” research practice. However, our view is that it’s impossible to be disengaged from the subject of development research, and is in fact unethical to not contribute something concrete.

With IDS, all of the interviews and meetings were facilitated by Sammy, leading up to a gathering of everyone to reflect on the results. This was incredibly valuable for everyone to share their perspectives and understand others. We thought of it as Group Therapy. Additionally, we organized an amazing inquiry led learning session with Aptivate, which contributes to creating a guide book for future trainings.

Complement ongoing projects and schedule

Participating in research takes a lot of time and energy. Map Kibera is busy! The perfect time for you might a horrible time for us. Again, let’s work together to design the research so that it doesn’t negatively impact the actually doing stuff.

This isn’t easy of course. Even with IDS, we were going 150% to do both the research and the rest of the day to day. But we worked it out!

Avoid Survey Fatigue

Kibera has survey fatigue. Imagine having a complete stranger coming to your door to ask you detailed questions about your family’s toilet habits. And then someone else doing it. And again. Would you even answer the first time?

Question whether a survey is really required. Can you get the information you need from someone else, or by a different technique. If you must survey, design it in such a way to reduce time required to answer your questions.

Publish data and results open access

Not surprising, I hope, coming from us. Share your research paper openly, in an open access journal or by publishing to your website.

You’ll be able to find all the IDS research results on this blog when finalized.

Further, publish the data, or make it easily available to other researchers. Your data can live its own life, and benefit way beyond what’s possible in your own work. If the data is sensitive, then of course be careful, but remember the default is sharing everything.

What else?

Let us know in the comments!

This post is part of a series exploring the ideas and issues that have emerged in our research project with Institute of Development Studies, supported by DFID. All posts from the Map Kibera team, the researchers from IDS, our trainers and colleagues are collected here. As always, we are eager to discuss this work, so we hope to hear your comments.

This is a continuation of this post on the Kibera economy.

For the Map Kibera youth themselves, having enough money to simply survive (and often help family members survive) is the concern in the background of most of their lives and decisions (see this video by some members of KNN on the subject). It’s completely understandable that despite our efforts to convey a kind of collaborative DIY camaraderie in this project – ie, that we were bringing skills to share but were not “parents”, “employers”, or “matatu drivers” (see below), they still saw us as the white rich outsiders bringing opportunities and jobs. This is simply the mold we appeared to fit, and no matter what we said, it continued to be their impression. We stressed we were only bringing training not hiring them for a job. But they wanted a job! And they knew someone who “volunteered” with, xyz organization and received money for “transport and airtime” amounting to 3 or 4 times what one could possibly spend locally on that expense. (Over time, we found out that this was the norm in part because paying people became much more complicated legally and fiscally than giving out airtime vouchers – a distortion caused by donors suspicious of direct payment.)

So, the bigger issue of payment persisted with our own group. The mappers, videographers, SMS reporters, everyone wanted and wants to be paid. This makes sense, of course – they hope to and need to create a viable livelihood, but the idea that you can jump over the part where you actually learn the skill and go straight into a job market is based on experience with NGOs. We did pay participants a small amount particularly during the intensive mapping phase, (which we debated about endlessly with everyone we talked to in Kibera). We also helped create an organization, but it’s not for us – we’re not the employers and they’re not the employees of the organization – we’re merely assisting in a co-creation of a structure so they can carry forth and solicit donations and paid projects and take on expansion themselves. Or so we thought, incorrectly as it turns out. You see, Kenyans can be, well, rather indirect in such matters, if I may make a generalization.

This misunderstanding came to a head during our research with the Institute of Development Studies and focus groups with Sammy Musyoki brought out the fact that our group saw us in a particular, quite non-equal-opportunity way. Of course, we had discussed many times with everyone how the Trust was going to go – they all nodded ferociously at the end of casual conversations with KNN or the mappers, all of us crammed in to the tiny room in the KCODA offices, several to a chair, desk or bench, in which we all agreed about various roles and responsibilities. These meetings were often peppered with Mikel or I saying things like, “what do you think, guys, how do you want things to look?” or “we’ve never done this before either so we all have to work together, we don’t have all the answers.” In other words, I don’t want you getting the impression that we came in all teacherly and managerial and sat in front of the room or even had handouts or agendas or the various trappings of Western corporate bureaucracy, though to be sure at some point we began suggesting that the guys do things like write agendas and take minutes. Our approach with them was in no small way aimed at being, well, participatory. This open-ended stuff, we found, not only didn’t work but met with blank stares (what do you mean you don’t have everything worked out ahead of time!). Some of the reason for this came out in our Training of Trainers sessions with Aptivate, when they guys discussed their own learning experiences, which included being beaten by teachers with various implements for failing to understand math (and then being beaten with hockey sticks by rival sports teams). The British System here reminds me of my parents’ stories of Catholic school in the US in the 1940s.

During the discussions with Sammy, a Kenyan himself and skilled facilitator, the guys came out with various metaphors for our relationship with them – including employer/employee, parent/child, and even, matatu (bus) driver/passengers. They also envisioned us both as drivers who had left the bus stranded, and parents who didn’t apportion cake evenly to their children. It seemed our words on both money and leadership had never really hit home. At one point Sammy said, well, the matatu is valuable so if you don’t get in and drive it someone else will! Here’s your chance, in other words.

To make matters worse, getting small short-term jobs with NGOs often involves tasks that look somewhat like what we do – say, one can be hired as a “volunteer” survey-taker or “volunteer” going around talking to people about health, etc. Even attending training courses is often a paid activity – some organizations, for instance, pay participants so that they can afford to attend in lieu of whatever odd jobs and “hustling” (as the guys would say) that they might otherwise engage in. During our meetings, for instance at KNN, we would usually give attendees enough for lunch (literally about $1) which was still enough to have to later have to intentionally kick out the “lunchers” – those who never did anything but show up that one hour for lunch. More than any other group of people in a developing country or poor place that I’ve encountered, Kiberans are wise to the fact that without them, there is no GBV prevention, there is no health survey, there is no NGO. This may seem like convoluted logic, because obviously these programs are created to address needs in Kibera! But the fact is, I would also be a bit suspicious too, asking what’s in this for me, if I saw the likes of Melinda Gates, the president of the Nike foundation, and the executive director of Unicef visit me in Kibera within the span of a few months (Gates and Nike in the same week!) – evidence of huge numbers of donor dollars and international attention – and yet my own pockets were so empty that a mere toothache proved to be a debilitating ailment.

What’s the solution? I must honestly confess that when it comes to Kibera economics, I can’t fully answer that. I know, it’s a cop-out. The aid industry has somehow created an economy out of false promises and castles in the air, and now everyone’s discovered the world is a much more complicated place than they ever imagined and they can’t fix it in the way they once thought (though perhaps technology is the current candidate for silver-bullet). It’s true that the handout-dependency problem is alive and well, perhaps at its healthiest in Kibera. It’s also true that we do-gooders bear much of the burden for this. But it’s not true that we can’t expect something different, or act different ourselves.

By the end of our reckoning with Sammy and the Map Kiberans, which we later referred to as “group therapy”, we did have some ideas for what we can all do differently. For one, having skilled cultural mediators is critical – we had started with several, but unfortunately they had not held the rare set of qualities which really allows one to dance between several cultures and keep their own agenda in check all the while. The entire group of youth decided to take on driving the matatu, and the differences between them (and even us) seemed to dissolve in the relief at having gotten some of the hidden issues into daylight. I realized that one thing they craved was this kind of motivating  joy of unity – we had a bit of a Map Kibera tent revival meeting. I thought that responsibility for the project was also shared more appropriately and the central reason for doing the project was centered back onto its social merit rather than personal profitability.

So, we have committed ourselves for the time being with slogging through the difficult process of working with our team of some 30 youth in three programs in Map Kibera Trust to turn the standard model around. Part of that means, everyone has to demonstrate commitment and draw up requirements for their own participation, be part of the budgeting and strategic planning for their own program and then create criteria for who receives money when and for what (whether it’s called stipend, lunch, transport, or salary). We want this to be a youth-led organization, in the long run. Our work in Mathare is structured differently, and we think this will help though it’s still early days. There are in fact several good role models, and a lot of people who’ve worked through all this before. We’ve spent a good deal of time clarifying the vision of the work and our role, and we’re now committed to a long-term capacity building and organizational development process in Kibera. Our group is still alternately frustratingly passive and expecting handouts, and so generous, creative, dedicated, and organized that they inspire me to keep doing everything I can to support them. The key is often to commit to the process, and know that at the heart of success will be inspiring some balance between self-interest and seeing the opportunities for selfless contribution to society. But isn’t that, in fact, the same balance we all strive – and sometimes fail – to achieve?

This post is part of a series exploring the ideas and issues that have emerged in our research project with Institute of Development Studies, supported by DFID. All posts from the Map Kibera team, the researchers from IDS, our trainers and colleagues are collected here. As always, we are eager to discuss this work, so we hope to hear your comments.

By far the most striking thing for me about Kibera – the most unexpected and most challenging – has been working in what I consider to be an artificially-constructed economy.

That is to say, there are no simple volunteer projects in Kibera. At least, none founded by outsiders.

This has been an evolving thread through our work and has upended some of our original thinking on open-source or simply, development projects. You might say we were merely naive. Why on earth would anyone living in dirt-poor conditions want to “volunteer” just for the good of their community? Have you met a lot of jobless people in America or Europe who can barely feed their children, wear threadbare clothes and shoes, and have to pay to use a dirty latrine piping up to volunteer on raising awareness on HIV?

It’s an unfair comparison, I know. The fact of the matter is that in the slums one might volunteer to clean up the latrines or build a new one, simply because no one else is going to do it for them. And someone with HIV or whose family members are affected might well wish to spread the word about prevention. And certainly there are many, many true volunteers – they just tend to be starting things themselves from within Kibera, and hoping things will turn around soon.

We hoped that the value of the trainings we were offering would be in and of themselves enough. We also hoped that motivation would come from a desire to improve Kibera, the kind of community motivation that would be a matter of pride and would perhaps stem from a sense of the systemic injustice represented by a slum. Personally, I probably had thoughts of working in Latin America, where indigenous communities have often self-organized and pushed very hard on social justice issues, where poverty itself is seen as a justice and human rights issue, and there is a long legacy of social thought and philosophy underpinning most community-based organizations.

What we found, instead, is a community so influenced economically by years of “interventions” by various international development organizations that a full shadow economy has developed. It’s not the black market – it’s the shadow aid market. Ask any Kibera resident about jobs they’ve held in the past and most will mention some volunteering with aid agencies or small NGOs in the community. And by “volunteering” they mean getting paid to do a job. It’s evidence of the perversion of donor dollar influx that the very term Volunteer connotes something completely different here than it does anywhere else. What has happened is that well-meaning organizations have set up projects in Kibera (thousands of them) and thereby actually created a “market” for participants in those programs. There are so many NGOs here that the demand is actually for Kiberans to take part, rather than the other way around. Of course, we felt that our project was different, and perhaps it is – a kind of meta-project created to make public all of the information that these hundreds of organizations were collecting, to allow direct self-mediation (non-mediation?) of information, news and stories, to hopefully drill a hole through the cacaphony of aid-speak about Kibera and allow a few actual people to speak through and tell the truth.

This was – and still is – our vision. But the economic conundrum remains. Kibera residents have learned that these NGOs need them – that they’re getting paid and raising a great deal of funds in order to develop programs and fill their presentations, events, workshops, and trainings with bodies. Kiberans have wised up to the fact that sometimes they’re being “sold” by agencies to donors even if the project hasn’t really made them better off – after all, who asked them? – and there have even been a few oft-repeated tales of random small children being photographed in Kibera with a white person who then used the photos to raise funds for their own pocket. (Of course, this is why we’re trying to create platforms of transparency – ways for people to disclose what’s happening in the community and expose the gaps). Kiberans whisper about ending up on billboards in America without a penny to show for it. Whether true or not – it’s probably happened, and then rumor made it sound like the norm – this shows the distrust that has developed under the welcoming Kibera surface. We’ve had arguments with participants to convince them that no, most white people don’t come to Kibera to get rich! This also explains why tourists shouldn’t simply wander through with their big cameras and photograph people, as they so often do. It hints at a much deeper recognition of the complicated, often contradictory relationship between the thousands of well-meaning white people who find their way to Kibera and those who live there every day, and the lack of any meaningful way for Kiberans to guide those relationships – coupled with their frequent dependency on them. There is an unwillingness to challenge openly a system that might one day prove to supply one of the few real jobs that are at hand – the coveted NGO position. (For me, this was frustrating since we set out to co-develop a project not fill it with employees – see part 2).

Eventually, there emerged an expectation of a “sitting fee” to attend someone’s meeting – yes, organizations paying people just to fill the seats in their events. This complicated our initial attempts to hold community meetings around the issue-based maps. The first one was organized by Regynnah, a mapper, on the topic of health. It was held in Raila, her own village. There were a good 30 people and it was a great success. However, we only gave out sodas to participants, no money or phone airtime. Regynnah came to us afterward and said now her contacts were mad at her because they expected to be paid for this 1-2 hour discussion of health – even though most of them were health practitioners and ostensibly interested in the topic. We hoped instead they’d be able to make use of the information – not demand a sitting fee.

We tackled this by making sure people knew in advance that no one would be paid for such discussions – meaning they might attract fewer people, but ones who are more intrinsically motivated to participate – and in fact, sometimes only 4 or 5 people showed up.

It was a challenge to us as well. We had to make these activities really worth their while, and create a working relationship based on trust that could lead to improvements in the sector in question. A lot more thinking went in to producing projects that would really engage communities and be driven by them as well as for them. We continue to unravel the idea of how to support people to share information in such a way that it changes the status quo in Kibera – how to complete the feedback loop and help people use technology to achieve their goals. The shadow economy, though, pulls people in different directions and in some cases fosters splintering of organizations and groups.

I do believe strongly that there needs to be a more equal exchange between any outsider and the Kibera people. This has informed a lot of our work trying to consolidate information in an open system rather than constantly requesting Kibera residents to answer surveys and participate in focus groups that will never have visible benefits to them (much less reports back on the findings). I’ve been appalled by many NGOs’ and  researchers’ total disregard for the worth of each person’s time and energy – perhaps a sitting fee should apply when research is done in this traditional, extractive way. One problem is that too often Kiberans profess excitement over any new project and pin their livelihood (and other) hopes on it, encouraging absolutely everyone that whatever hair-brained idea they came to Kibera is the greatest thing since sliced bread. Not to say this happened to us ;)

More on livelihoods and working with our Trust team in Part 2…

This post is part of a series exploring the ideas and issues that have emerged in our research project with Institute of Development Studies, supported by DFID. All posts from the Map Kibera team, the researchers from IDS, our trainers and colleagues are collected here. As always, we are eager to discuss this work, so we hope to hear your comments.