* Any views expressed in this opinion piece are those of the author and not of Thomson Reuters Foundation.
In a rare turn of events I am pleased to find an extra day on my agenda in Kenya following the Humanitarian HR conference in Nairobi, and so keenly take up the offer made by People In Aid member, Habitat for Humanity International, and one of its partners, Partners for Care (PFC), to show me around one of their local projects. Fascinating for me personally, just for being my first project visit, it also throws up some really interesting insights into leadership and team-work within small NGOs.
Having researched PFC online, I am really keen to see how they and their associated projects have managed to become so successful and attract such international attention so quickly. With my People In Aid ‘hat’ on, I’m also really interested to pick up on Connie’s focus on local leadership and how this has manifested itself in practical terms.
A little about my host
PFC was co-founded just over six years ago by Connie Cheren following a medical mission trip to Nairobi. Connie visited local slums and witnessed first-hand the impact that HIV and AIDS were having on children and adults alike. Inspired to help as best she could, upon returning home she began work on creating a project to help some of the people she had met.
Connie took the step of meeting with the International Leadership Institute as she began to set up her project, reasoning that, as Mandela points out, “if you create leaders then nations will change”.
In Connie’s own words, “the biggest challenge for projects in Kenya is what the Western World has done to developing nations – there is a definite power imbalance. Sometimes the westerner comes to developing nations and assumes the leadership role. Local staff, volunteers or members of these communities, need to know that they themselves are the leaders.”
Fast forward six years and PFC now boasts sports, education and medical initiatives throughout Kenya, all with the end goal of eliminating the spread and effects of HIV/AIDS and other preventable diseases. It is the latter of these which I have the opportunity of visiting on a sunny Friday morning.
I am picked up in the morning by PFC staff members, Franco Ushele and George Okello, who take myself and Mari Stephens (Director, Program Design, Monitoring & Evaluation at Habitat for Humanity International) to a local beauty college where they are presenting to a group of 30 or so female students. After quick introductions, water packs are introduced to those present.
The water packs, like simple plastic backpacks, are designed to ease the burden of carrying household water from access point to home. Designed by the Greif Corporation and distributed by Pack H2o, they have a removable liner that, after use, is easily sanitised by exposure to sunlight and they hold approximately 5 gallons (20l) of water. It is the distribution of these packs that Mari is there to observe, with Habitat for Humanity International currently preparing to distribute 200,000 of them.
Once the packs are introduced to the room, David Chazera, another PFC staff member, gives practical examples of how they work and encourages others to try them at the front of the room.
Though my Swahili isn’t what it ought to be, it is clear to me as an observer that the women present really listen intently to what is being presented to them and have enormous respect for George, Franco and David. I later discover that many of the staff employed at PFC are members of the beneficiary community themselves, including David, whose wife is in the audience today.
From the school we head back on the dusty roads down to one of the medical centers that PFC runs, located on the outskirts of a slum called Jua Kali in an area called Marurui. A relatively small slum (I am stunned to learn) which houses around 3,500 people, 70% of whom are under 30 years old. Structured along one long path, the slum is just 100 feet wide by over 3000 feet long.
The medical center is housed in a small complex next to the ‘what if?” Computer School, which PFC also runs, offering free computer training to the community. John Wang’ombe, the Computer School Manager, talks me briefly through the syllabus, which touches on seven different modules ranging from typing skills to basic Microsoft packages. I spy a teenage girl on Facebook in the corner of the room and presume she must be a fast learner.
The medical center itself is small. The front door enters into a reception which leads onto a few small clinical rooms. It is in one of these that I find Dr. Mercy, a doctor working for PFC, who is now entering her second permanent month at the clinic. She describes to me how the center operates using new technology, mHealth:
“The PFC staff members have a phone with software on and go from home to home seeking anyone who may need medical assistance. When they find someone, they take a photo of them on their phone, detail their ailments, capture their personal details (age, sex, location) and send it directly to me. I then log in to the system and review the patient. Once complete I send the staff members my comments, they get the reply and then advise the patient directly or obtain medication for them.”
I am keen to know how the community is engaging with the project: “They now look for the workers every day.” Mercy tells me, “they also now more and more take the initiative to come to the medical center themselves, whereas before it was a problem because they feared it would be expensive.”
Clearly very passionate about the work that she does, I ask Dr. Mercy what she likes most about working here. She tells me that working for the clinic is like being part of a family. Profession-wise, she tells me that her greatest reward is getting local people to take ownership of their own health. “This center is theirs,” she stresses “and we need it to become self-sufficient.” Dr. Mercy explains that one of the Outreach Coordinators, Peter Maina, lives in the community and therefore is well respected. I ask if I would be as successful as Peter in working in the community and delivering the mHealth reports to her. The answer is as I expect: “No, because they would think you do not understand what they are going through.”
So after thanking Dr. Mercy and being introduced to Peter and the Medical Clinic Office Manager, Charles Mathenge, we all head out to make some visits and to see the technology in action.
Full photos from the visit can be found here
Jua Kali means ‘hot sun’ in Swahili and it doesn’t take me long to discover why. Upon being invited inside someone’s home, the heat hits me. Where the homes here are made from corrugated iron they heat up immensely, making many of the homes akin to an oven on full temperature.
We first visit an elderly couple living on the outskirts of the slum. While the team tends to his ill wife I talk to the husband, who (through his nephew translating) explains that he has lived here a long time and proudly shows us a photograph taken in 1984. From this, we work his age out to be 93. He expresses his gratitude to the PFC staff members for being here and then insists I take a picture of him and his nephew, in the hope he can hang it next to his existing one on the wall.
Once finished with some further home visits, we drive up to the PFC house/compound, where many of the other team members work from, to sit down with Connie herself and the PFC Kenya Executive Director, Sammy Wanjau.
As I sit with Connie for a few minutes it’s easy to see where the staff members are getting their inspiration from. An engaging and enthusiastic woman, she immediately expresses her gratitude for me being here, thanks me for my ‘professional’ photographs, and offers me a drink and some food. Politely declining the soda in favour of water, I try and explain that I am by no means a professional photographer but she is having none of it (though my ego is).
Connie explains to me exactly how PFC is now structured: “We have 27 full-time staff employees in the NGO here in Kenya [.] and a very small operation in the US which incurs no costs.”
Though small, the US base has been core to securing funds and partnerships such as the one with MIT’s Sana, the company whose mHealth initiative powers the technology they use in the clinic I visited earlier.
After meeting so many of the staff I am keen to know Connie’s perceptions of them and any challenges she has faced in forming what seems like an incredibly slick locally-operated organisation.
“I consider myself as a coach to the people here. Look at it this way,” she reasons, “solving health problems in a developing-nation is like a game, and one which has to be played well. The people who have to play that game are the nationals. Sometimes when western influences come, we displace them, telling them to sit in the stands. We then play their game for them and when we go home, they are no more qualified to play the game than when we came.”
Continuing the analogy she explains how she reasons with others who want to help:
“A sports team needs a lot of things. They need a booster club just to pay the funds to get them to the next game: they need cheerleaders, trainers and more. Essentially, they need to become better players in order to solve the world’s health problems.”
On the importance of building local capacity, Connie describes how her goal for many of the staff working for the NGO is just to give them a platform, so that they can exercise the passion they already have – “the passion to help their own people”.
Kenya Executive Director, Sammy cements the point, explaining to me how important it is for PFC to have big staff numbers on the ground [and not in the US]:
"There are so many requirements of us as an NGO including governmental, financial, political etc – which is why having staff with local knowledge is so important to us. I am here to help my own people, as is everyone else, and with that same goal and vision, we have built an organisation which feels more like a family."
Connie continues: “When I first came here and began some of this work, I realised very quickly that if I stepped back, someone would step forward.”
I ask about diversity and if that is ever a problem within the workforce here, having learnt that there are seven different tribes represented amongst the team.
“The majority of these staff members came together after the post-election violence in 2007,” she explains, “...we all saw the internally displaced people and that helped in terms of building team ethics [.] Trust is the most important thing within an organisation.”
Concluding, she tells me that “we [as Westerners] should not be the heroes in their story, they should. For me, there’s sometimes a bit of a football player left in me, where the coach wants to get back on the field, but I know that ultimately it will do them no good – we cannot play their game.”
