Despite previous efforts to install lights in Kibera, some through the Adopt-A-Light program initially headed by Nairobi women representative Esther Passaris, and others through the Nairobi County government, there have still been reports of a rise in criminal activities within Nairobi’s informal settlements such as Kibera, Mathare, Mukuru among others.
Previous programs had overlooked the need to actively engage the community in the process of installing lights in our informal settlements, in the quest to achieve the goal of having proper security measures that can protect residents within the slums.
Other challenges that have faced those other programs include frequent blackouts witnessed in slums as a result of tampering with electricity lines, transformers, and power cables.
It was for this reason that Map Kibera, Kibera Town Centre, and LIF came together to conduct a ‘Measuring Lights Impact’ survey within Kibera slums, to get the much-needed input and community engagement ahead of solar-powered street lights installments, not just in the streets of Kibera, but also deep inside the residentials.
The survey has been conducted in Gatwekera Village, Kianda Village, Soweto Village, and parts of Makina Village.
Feedback has been good so far, with many residents welcoming the idea of having solar security lights as opposed to electric lights.
Nicholas Ogutu, a Kibera resident who lives in Soweto West village, and works as a construction expert, says his work sometimes involves traveling long distances, and most of the time he has to leave the house in the early morning hours when it is still dark.
“With the lights having been installed in the village, I will not have to worry about being attacked by criminals when I happen to leave while it is still dark outside, and that will have improved my work and by extension, my life” he adds.
Irara, who lives in Kianda village and is waiting to join college, hopes that the lights are installed as soon as possible, to help her while leaving or coming back from her early morning or late night classes in case she will have any, once she joins college.
The survey was conducted by 10 youths from Kibera, who walked from one household or business to the other, with a set of questions that helped to determine the state of security in each village and the location of each light within that said village.
As the project proceeds, we are looking forward to getting more feedback from the residents in the post-installment survey once the lights have been installed in all the designated areas.
On Sunday 1st July 2012, we’ve just had a visitation by people from Global Voices, and they were about 20 visitors. I led the meeting, Sande gave voice presentation, Maureen gave a mapping presentation, and Joshua gave Kibera News Network presentation. Then, all group was taken out in the field under different interests. We had four interests starting with meeting people with HIV/AIDS, going to the points where they express technology literacy, education, and meeting the ambassadors of peace in the community. A lot of questions were asked and the young innovative leaders answered them. It was a nice experience…….Being a leader is an experience to learn.
#gv2012
“Hello!
Thank you for sending in the link on time and tagging it correctly. I just watched the video – love the narration and the background music. However the music and the sound suddenly goes off in the middle, and as per the submission guidelines the video cannot be longer than 10 mins . Please cut down on the video length, other participants also asked me if they can make a 13-15 minute video – and I had to say no.
Simply edit those segments, looking forward to your updated video by tomorrow night.
Nilofar.
This is a message we get from Nilofar after hurriedly submitting our video “From Wild To Digital World ” for the Digital Natives video contest.
The message was referred to John Musila, one of the KNN members that we had suggested to be the contact person during this contest. The message was demoralizing as time was not on our side.
We had one month to work on the video but were still busy doing some other things, though we registered in time. The contest required us to first write a proposal elaborating on what our video will be all about after reading and choosing a topic from one of the four books available online. We did all that and later got an email that our proposal was approved so we qualified and could go ahead and make a video that would be enrolled for competition.
It was only two days left to the deadline of submission of the videos, we had hardly started working on it, the previous two days we were very busy filming the Butterfly Works Project, so we were done and were now ready to work on this DN video before the deadline ends, only to realize that the footage we had saved on the hard disk for the video could not be used anymore, the hard drive had crashed, so we were stuck.
How will we start filming everything again and edit within the short time remaining? we thought, at some point we were stranded, but we could not afford to let this chance go, come on, we must do something, we all had the same spirit.
“Call Kepha, the Director, to help us fix the hard disk” someone suggested, yes I called Kepha, but this would take sometime before it is fixed and we will miss out the chance.
Still standing there inside Map Kibera Trust Office, looking at each other in a confused mode,
“Hey guys lets go and get new footage, we can’t sit here and wait for Kepha” I said, then we quickly divided ourselves, Joe and Eddie were going to get footage of the Ngong forest and some shots of schools and hospitals, while Jacob and I were taking Mildred out to the field for mapping interviews and some more cutaways, Steve and John would remain back for editing, and off we went.
Back to the office we noticed that we needed an interview from a member of Voice of Kibera to make our story complete, luckily enough Sande appeared then we quickly set him up for an interview which was successful. The program was so tight that we had to do everything the same day, because the following day was the deadline, we then took Steve down to the railway line to let him talk about KNN, the tripod was so disappointing but we managed with it then rushed back to the office, now I was to go outside with Jacob to do the narration as Steve was previewing the shots we had taken so far, as we wait the shots from Joe and Eddie.
Time check 2pm Joe and Eddie brought the footage and editing started, by 8pm Steve was done, the video was ready for consumption, so we left it uploading overnight. Coming to the office very early the following morning, to check if our video was uploaded, I met a big message on the screen, “sorry the upload was interrupted due to internet interruption” I had to start afresh. The uploading process also became a nightmare, it could get up to 82% then stops there, but after trying three times without success, we almost gave up, then we decided to use a different computer which finally worked.
We were happy after sending the link to the DN, little did we know that we still had a lot to correct, the message in the first paragraph surprised us, we went back to the time line corrected the video and resent it, then quickly got a response from Nilofar that it was better now and that he loved it.
We were now relieved, I personally felt as if I had just walked out from a prison cell, I was a free man again after a very busy working week.
Before we submitted the video we called Kepha to view it and comment, “this is a winning stuff” is all he said, we were happy considering how hurriedly we worked on it, we had high hopes of winning, we mobilized our friends on Facebook and Twitter to vote for our video which they cooperatively did, the votes from the public alone were not going to determine the winner, there was a panel of judges to also watch and decide the top two winners.
Am happily writing this blog after the announcement that we were the top position, with over 10000 votes, followed closely by Marie a lady from USA with 9000 votes.
We have won a prize of 500 EUROS, I must say thanks a lot to everyone that helped us make it through, those who voted, those we interviewed the Digital Natives Staff, the Jury, all KNN members for a wonderful cooperation and Map Kibera Trust at large for the this great platform to exercise our skills.
By Joshua Ogure,
KNN Coordinator
