Map Kibera

Raoul Klapp, a geography teacher at the Athénée de Luxembourg, a secondary school in the Grand-Duchy of Luxembourg, got in touch earlier this year to discuss his lesson plans for his geography class.

I was amazed by the work that the team has carried out and by this pioneering idea in slum GIS cartography. Since I teach a so-called ‘netbook class’, a pilot-project in Luxembourg, in which each student uses a netbook as a digital enhancement to conventional classroom activity, Map Kibera, through its webpage and lively blogs, convinced me that it could be an amazing opportunity to provide my students with a hands-on, real-world geography/GIS experience and show them how people could raise national and international awareness.

As we were already covering the issue of sustainable (urban) development in class, my 10th grade students (aged 15-17) expressed great interest in getting involved in Map Kibera and doing research on amenities present in Kibera by using GIS software (QGIS) with the perspective on doing their part in helping the people and community of Kibera and the Map Kibera team.

Awesome! All the data Map Kibera collects is available in OpenStreetMap, and extracts downloadable. So, combined with stories published on Voice of Kibera, Kibera News Network, and other sources on the web, the students were able to use both open data and open source software in their class. Such a collaboration could easily be replicated with other schools … especially right here in Kenya!

Last week, Raoul shared the results.

My students enjoyed doing the work a lot! I am currently evaluating their feedback – seems strikingly positive so far.
They very much liked the fact that they could help out *real* people with an issue connected to the *real* world an not only doing arts for arts’ sake.

All of the student posters, and photographs, can be accessed on dropbox. They are mostly in French; going to look into printing out a couple for the walls of the Map Kibera office.

Next Semester

The class project received positive feedback from all, so is developing further in the next school year. Our suggestion is to focus on other parts of Nairobi, like Mukuru and Mathare, where Map Kibera has initiated new mapping efforts, and where there is much less attention generally than Kibera.

It’s exciting that young people from very different parts of the world, from the slums of Nairobi, and the classrooms of Luxembourg, can collaborate so easily with today’s technology. There is so much opportunity for this to expand, to other classrooms and other cities. Map Kibera welcomes more chances to connect. Hoping the students from Luxemborg join Map Kibera’s Facebook group and make friends with the team here.

Very much worth pointing out that there is no reason at all the collaboration needs to be so distant. It’s likely that these students now know more of the facts about life in Kibera than most Kenyans! Several conversations this week in Nairobi show growing interest in substantial technological engagements in the classroom. Perhaps the curriculum Raoul is developing could be shared and jointly developed with Kenyan classrooms, and lead to connections right here across the country.

Just the other day 24th April 2012, World Bank via Africa Gathering organized a serious  forum for brainstorming session at Business Lounge, Junction Mall, Ngong Road Nairobi Kenya. The session was meant for the Kenyan youths to discuss high unemployment rate in Kenya and Africa at large, and I happened to have been in that meeting. Marieme Jamme who was sent by the World Bank to get Kenyan’s views concerning unemployment, started by wanting to know who amongst us were employed, unemployed, and self employed, it then emerged that a lot of people were self employed.                                                                                                                                                              

The meeting composed of different people selected randomly from different places. Are there jobs in Kenya ? Jamme asked, many people were like not sure but later poured answers like jobs are there but corruption,  high qualifications and experiences, bad education system etc.

Jamme wanted to get a report, a report that she would take back to the World Bank, unlike all a long World Bank has been giving reports to Africans, this time they wanted a report from Africans to the World Bank.                                                                                                                                                                                    

Looking at some of the things that can be done to end poverty in Kenya and other parts of Africa, farming was coming out strongly as one of the best things one can embark on, but not all people can be farmers, again Kenyan youths feels that farming is not a” sexy” job to do, the youths would prefer clean office jobs, a white Kenyan farmer was then given a chance to present her talk, according to her farming is the way to go, she showed us what she had done and what she had achieved with farming. But still it was had to convince a Kenyan youth to turn into farming.   

We were then asked to define who an ordinary Kenyan is, after different people gave different answers on this, it then dawned to us that most people in this meeting were well off and were running there own businesses. How many people here comes from the slums, one person asked, I was the only one from Kibera slum, this was a challenge to the organizers because many unemployed youths comes from the slums, then the whole attention turned on me, I became like the reference point and I represented many unemployed youths from Kibera.

I had a lot of questions to answer, then we were quickly divided into three groups to find a  possible solution to the en rooting unemployment , from the the groups the most alarming issue was the bad education system that many suggested needs to be looked at a gain.

by Joshua Owino, Kibera News Network

Reposted from http://joshculture.wordpress.com/2012/05/