Urban Schools and WaSH Projects

Two of the other partners that MCC works with here in Kenya are Menno Kids Academy and Mukuru Menno Academy.  These are schools associated with the Kenyan Mennonite Church, and located in the informal settlements (“slums”) of Nairobi.  These schools take students from “baby class” (preschool) through standard 8 (8^th grade) that live in the area.  There are three of us MCC service workers that work with these schools: Cristina helps them with finances, Jodi works with education curriculum, and I (Doug) work with their water projects.  I’ll comment on what I do in the schools, working with the water projects.

Nairobi is known for having a large population in the slums, as is the case for most African cities.  An estimated 60% or more of the 5 million people in Nairobi live in the informal settlements, most often in corrugated tin shacks or concrete buildings of the neighboring areas.  The recent collapse of a poorly built building is typical of these areas.  A family of 5-7 people lives in a single room, and each floor of 3 or 4 rooms has a single toilet.  In Mathare, for instance, an average of 18 people share each toilet, and people will get up hours early just so that they can get to use the toilet in the morning.  Earnings are about $50-100 per month.  Nairobi is somewhat unusual in that the informal settlements are scattered throughout the city – this seems to be an effect of the original colonial arrangement (wealthy landowner “estates” surrounded by the low-income worker residences; that pattern has held over with areas of middle and high income neighborhoods interspersed with low-income areas).  A recent study also outlined the crucial role that corruption has played in creating a largely inefficient city, where vested interests hinder the conversion of slums into formal neighborhoods.  Mathare and Mukuru are examples of the scattered location of the slums, they are adjacent to formal residential areas, and industrial and business districts.  These are the places where there are schools that MCC partners with.  Kibera is the best known slum here, often cited as the “largest slum in the world” (perhaps not accurate, but certainly true that a very large number of people live there). 

Land use in Nairobi and locations we live and work (except Kibera, we don’t work there).  Red are informal settlements, blue residential, green industrial, purple institutions. 

My summary observation is that people living in slums live in a world of insecurity.  That insecurity takes various forms, from financial, to health, to homes, to physical violence.  Financially, people live in fear of losing what jobs they have, and are hesitant to challenge the status quo.  Health fears are from HIV, malnutrition, and water-borne diseases (back to that in a moment).  People live with the fear of losing their homes, as most are rented shacks on insecure land, which can be converted at any time to a building site.  And there is physical violence – women as usual are at most risk, and this is a major challenge in promoting sanitation, as women risk violence when they visit community toilets, especially at night. 

MCC works with WaSH (water, sanitation and hygiene) projects in two schools.  The components of that program are:

1) SODIS for clean water.  This is solar disinfection, water in clear plastic bottles placed in the sun will be safe to drink after 6 hours (or 2 days, if it is cloudy).  Each student in the school has two bottles, one is in their classroom they can use for drinking, and the other is on racks in the sun for the next day.  It’s an elegant solution for clean water, and works well in the schools themselves.  There are more challenges in getting the families in the community to use them though, and it isn’t commonly practiced in houses.  Reasons for this seem to include: theft of bottles (which do have some recycling value), lack of space (for instance people that live in multi-story homes have no place to put them in the sun), cost of getting bottles, and fear of poisoning.  Personally, I think there is a psychological hurdle also, SODIS simply hasn’t reached critical mass where people view it as a desirable way to get clean water.  Studies show that adoption of WaSH technologies like this are not just a matter of convincing people it’s good for their health, but more importantly it must be aspirational (for instance, it should be something that appeals to their status in the community).  So promoting these things is complicated (Alex and Evan roll their eyes whenever I resort to saying “it’s complicated” in my explanations! 

(By the way, the common question of whether plastics leach into the water from the bottles does not seem to be a health concern, studies to date suggest this doesn’t occur to any substantial degree). 

2) Hygiene, basically hand-washing.  Hand-washing stations are provided in schools, and students are taught to wash their hands at times we know are critical for preventing disease transmission.  So students all line up (well, “mass up” is perhaps a better description) at the faucets before getting lunch. 

3) Sanitation, which is providing clean toilets.  This has greatly improved the environment around the schools, as we’re told by those that have been there a long time - there are now longer feces obviously present.  Often this was in the form of so-called “flying toilets”, residents defecation in a plastic bag and then sling it out into the river, open space or just the pathways to get rid of it.  This is especially the case at night, when there are security issues with leaving the house.  In the community, there are some options for paying to use a toilet (around 3-5 “bob”, or shillings; that’s 3-5 cents each time, compared with a household income around $50-100 per month).  One of the interesting and somewhat successful models has been Fresh-life toilets, a private company that uses a toilet franchise model, their toilets are readily obvious around the Mukuru area.  They then pick up the waste, which they compost in a facility outside Nairobi and then sell to farmers in Kenya.  This is probably one of the few successful user-pays models for water and sanitation provision, in fact there is somewhat of a debate whether these public health services can be effectively provided with a private sector model, or whether they need to be funded as a public good (akin to many services in developed countries).  There are some indications that the number of flying toilets is in fact less than it was in the past.  Interestingly, there are also suggestions that the new problem is use of cheap disposable diapers, which are then tossed out in the streets.

Organizations like that running Fresh-life illustrate the good things that are happening.  So despite all the insecurity and problems (and much like in refugee camps, I’m told), I find it important to remember that slums are not places devoid of hope.  Although not “nice” in the sense of being clean and beautiful, there’s a certain satisfaction each time in driving or walking into the slums for work, and seeing something or somebody new that is working to improve the situation.  And there is personal satisfaction in connecting with a part of the human condition on earth that represents such a large part of the world’s population, but that we can so easily ignore, either intentionally or not.

So despite our family being resolutely less inclined towards cities, we enjoy the work in this city and find some enjoyment in living in “the green city in the sun” (as Nairobi’s nickname has been).  Things rapidly felt familiar after moving here, but after nearly a year now have moved to feeling more like a home. 

I tend not to take pictures in the slums, but if you want accurate visual images of what it is like, here are a few places to look:

African Slum Journal

BBC story on Mathare

DotEarth post about Mathare, and concerns about election violence

Conservation Agriculture and Sand Dams

Since we’ve posted mostly pictures on this blog, and in our typical day-to-day MCC work/life we typically don’t take as many pictures, I’ll take some time to write a bit in this blog post. 

It’s been raining hard in Nairobi, April is the wettest month of the year.  Things are always green here, even during the dry season, but it’s nice to have the dust settled.  It slows travel sometimes, a heavy rain on Nairobi streets can cause extra back-ups.  Schools are on one of their between-term breaks, so that slows down our activities a bit also.  Schools are about half of my work here, I’ll write more about work at those schools in another post.  The other half of my work is in rural areas, and I’ll write a bit about that here.

I wrote a short article about these organizations for Intersections (the “theory and praxis quarterly” journal published by MCC) recently, which is a more focused explanation of their work, and explains a few things not included here.  The pdf version has the entire issue on natural resource management.

I (Doug) was out in Ukambani (the Machakos and Kitui region, several hours east of Nairobi) recently, so will report on those activities first. 

Ukambani shown in shaded green

MCC works through local partners, and MCC Kenya has some 25 partners across the country.  Two of those are SASOL and UDO, both local organizations that work with farmers to improve livelihoods and increase food security.  These organizations have been known for promoting sand dams, but they are more fundamentally concerned about different ways that communities in ASALs (arid and semi-arid lands) can have improved livelihoods.  As Mutinda, the director at SASOL, told me this week, as population and cultivation increases in the best land around Africa, attention will increasingly turn to large ASALs as the key areas that can feed and house the continent.  So they see sand dams as one tool for those communities, and they increasingly are focusing their programming on other activities such as conservation agriculture. 

I work with SASOL and UDO on two aspects of their work: conservation agriculture, and sand dams.  Both organizations are part of a larger conservation agriculture project “Scaling up conservation agriculture in East Africa” – one of about a dozen partners in Kenya, Ethiopia and Tanzania funded through Canadian Food Grains Bank (through the Canadian government) that is looking to impact at least 50,000 farmers.  This project is just starting, so I’ve been helping the partners as they formulate their project plan, set their budgets and timetables, and in general get their plans in order for approval.  They are just starting their work on this project, both having just finished baseline surveys of several hundred households, and starting the selection process for farmers who will start CA.  CA here is focused on rainfed farming (vs irrigation) for small scale farmers.  As with all CA, it focuses on three basic principles of crop production: keeping soil covered with mulch, no (or reduced) tillage, and crop rotation/intercropping.  In working with the partners, it’s interesting to have many discussions about what technical practices work or don’t work in CA (for instance, are herbicides necessary to control weeds, which are often a larger problem in CA?), and what practices effectively increase farmer adoption of CA (for instance, does giving free seeds the first year encourage adoption?).  And it’s interesting just to learn about agriculture in Africa – a recent article in the Economist gives an interesting (and optimistic) picture of agriculture on the continent.  And as I travel more often to the towns of Kitui and Kola, and neighboring regions, I enjoy the warm hospitality and the interesting stories of my Kenyan colleagues!

As mentioned earlier, SASOL and UDO are well known for their work on sand dams.  There are lots of good accounts of sand dams, for example CFGB has a short video on sand dams, and our friend and colleague from Harrisonburg Dr. Wayne Teel has written a good account of sand dams at UDO.  As with all things, there are enthusiastic “believers” and “non-believers” in sand dams, and many in the gradient in between those two extremes.  Although it is easy to observe the benefits of functional dams, there are questions about how many sand dams end up functioning well, and how the benefits compare to the considerable invest costs of starting a sand dam.  I am helping UDO and SASOL starting a rigorous evaluation of some aspects of sand dam effectiveness that will help answer some of those questions.  Included in this evaluation is a needed assessment of the quality of the water from sand dams.  We know that sand dams can store a lot of water under good conditions, but there is very little information on whether that water is (for instance) high or low in bacterial contamination.  The next dry season (Aug-Oct) will see me in the field a lot in Ukumbani helping to do this evaluation. 

Ukambani has the distinction of being known worldwide in circles of development workers and academics thinking about issues of sustainability, population, and agriculture.  This is largely due to the publication of the seminal book “More People, Less Erosion”, essentially arguing that the local environment and agriculture production has improved despite an increase in population pressure.  In short, they argue for a “boomster” rather than “doomster” view of population – that increased population presents opportunities rather than a threat.  Naturally, there are detractors to this view.  And there are other, newer threats to livelihoods in the region, the most obvious being climate change.  No farmer that I’ve met doubts the reality of climate change, in particular they comment on how the rains used to be predictable, but now they are never sure when (or if) it will rain.  A selling point for conservation agriculture is as a technique that is appropriate for the changing climate conditions.

Ukambani itself is an interesting region (find an interesting description of the region here).  The people in this area are the Akamba, a bantu group.  During colonial times, the area was “Machakos reserve”, in other words a place set aside for native Africans as it was not one of the more fertile areas of the country in demand by the white settlers.  Some settlers did set up coffee farms in the hills, but these largely disappeared when coffee prices decreased.  Also disappeared is the wildlife, there is a classic account of one of the early game wardens supervising the shooting of 1000 rhinos in a short period.  There are no rhinos left there, and generally no other large mammals, unlike the Athi plains to the west where wildebeest, giraffes, etc can still be seen wandering openly.  Tsavo borders Ukambani to the south, so animals do occasionally wander up from there, such as groups of elephants last year when food or water got scarcer in Tsavo.  Conflicts also occur along the eastern region as Somali herders run into conflicts with farmers about land use issues, especially along the Tana River.

So that is one description for what takes much of my time here in Kenya.  As anybody knows who has been to Africa, or many other areas of the world, life occurs at a different tempo here, and with different priorities.  While staying busy, I’m grateful to have a few years without the typical rush of an academic year!  Much time is spent relating to people – even when there are deadlines or meetings, it is always first priority to spend adequate time talking with people about their lives, families, country, etc.  The partners I work with have many times expressed appreciate for MCC’s commitment to walking with them in the long-term, and for valuing the personal relationships which are of paramount importance in Kenya.