By Nyasani Mbaka

It is 10.00 am; our gray van” Noah’s ark” snakes through Imara Daima Ward in Embakasi South sub-county, Nairobi. We try to get to Riara village in Mukuru Kwa Njenga Slums through Embakasi Girls High School, but the soft spoken security lady at the gate won’t let us through due to the ongoing Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education examination.

We decide to park the van by the roadside and walk towards the now familiar streets of Riara, a slum in Nairobi’s Mukuru slums. We make our way, to Bridge Education center for the graduation ceremony of forty community mobilisers of the Tujuane Tujengane Initiative (TTI). TTI is a Muungano wa Wanavijiji program that seeks to molbilise slum communities together to build a platform that nurtures participation through settlement forums and discusses communal challenges and offer solutions to those challenges through a partnership framework alongside city authorities and urban development stakeholders.

The programme aims at empower community organizers and activists to learn and share knowledge and experiences about grassroots social change in slum communities. This initiative offers a challenge and opportunity for slum dwellers to see themselves as a pool of change agents—many actions and relationships that can be built to create larger paradigm shifts.

At the education centre, we meet some of the federation (Muungano wa Wanavijiji) members in Riara, as well as other informal settlements, as far as Kiambu who had come to witness the graduation ceremony of 40 change makers-a community reborn.

Habari gani! We exchange greetings

We all hugged and laughed and caught up on a couple of initiatives that they were up to. David is a community youth leader in Riara and one of the grandaunts. We exchanged views on the just concluded American elections. David is working on his diploma studies and will graduate in March 2017.

“I have had my moments during the TTI training and my eyes are now open,” he told me. “Last night, as we watched the American elections, we were discussing the constitution and my little sister said she was going to vote for the first time and vote for that specific candidate who can help her community to get the job done. She used to feel her vote won’t count, but now we are taking the American lesson very seriously we’re all feeling more hopeful. When you start hearing such sentiments, from young people then, real change is in the offing.”

And Joseph Kimani… our programme officer, challenges him to begin working with the local youth and find their purpose for the greater good of the settlement. Prior to this opportunity, David referred to himself an idler without a vision, but in the last community clean up exercise , you would see the determination in his eyes.

What a difference four months can make! TTI, which was entirely community driven has made – and not just to the lives of these extraordinary young women, men and community at large, but to the fabric of a community that is getting more interwoven by the day.

Three months ago, in August, federation members in the process of collecting data in more than 158 settlements in Nairobi’s capital, to update the city profile begun reflecting about how they would reinvent the movement’s mobilisation strategy to build more inclusive communities, without necessarily imposing it’s ideals on the residents. The evening’s stories, which were meant as debrief sessions were incredibly moving – of overcoming challenges, community perspectives on how they would utilize data to challenge city authorities, of desires to effect real change, and of the frustration of living in densified settlements that lack access to services, that always hits the poor hardest.

Doris Moseti, a federation leader from Mukuru informal settlements in her maiden speech to encourage the grandaunts, “though I do not hold post secondary education certificate. And here I am standing in one of the slums where, in so many ways, I have received my real education, knowledge and expertise. Yet many of you here couldn’t go to college, not because you weren’t smart enough, but because you couldn’t afford to pay for your education.”

In the past three months, that group did a lot more than figure out details. They enumerated households in each of the eight clusters, mapped the settlement, created physical addresses for 480 sub clusters made up of 100 households each, organised interested community members in 23 new savings schemes, and then drafted members of the federation team and others to provide training on soft skills, community conflict resolution, people and resource mobilisation and business plan assistance on each of their weekly meetings.

The energies of at least 40 community mobilisers were released in the best possible way. At 3 p.m., we were all seated again in Bridge Education center when the day’s Master of Ceremony welcomed some of the grandaunts to give their personal testimonies. “Today, we are seeing tremendous transformation in the community; albeit slow we are certain that someday we are going to achieve positive change.” Said, Mr. Mwenje a community leader in Riara.

Some of the testimonies from the participants

Linneah Lijodi, of course ran the show wearing a black shirt with an engraving of a wrist watch and jeans. Her pride at what this group had accomplished was admirable. She enumerated her personal transformation from a shy naïve girl who minded her business and barely knew the different public office holders in her ward, the programme has helped her to transform to this vocal and steadfast community champion, especially protecting violation of child rights in her settlement. While at it she posses a legitimate question to the chief, “Mr. Chief I am sure you are aware there is a group of land grabbers hovering around in this settlement going round grabbing kid’s playing grounds, where will they play? Above all I mentor these kids and sometimes (Pointing to the kids sited in the room) and sometimes I challenge them to run a couple of laps, but how can they do this without a community space to exercise and grow up normally like other kids do…We ask for your intervention”. This caught many by surprise. Her boldness to challenge the status quo, and raise fundamental community concerns was applauded. She also asked the community to shun tribalism and work together to realize change and also, giving honor for all of the organizers and those who made this ceremony possible.

The Chief guest, Muungano wa Wanavijiji Chairperson, Rashid Mutua and the Area Chief Mr. Ocholla, hugged each recipient as they came up for their certificate, and each time, was impressed with the confidence of the participants and the sense of excitement in the room.

This is what development should look like – people coming together across lines of ethnicity and class to work together on a common endeavor in which every person in the room gives what they can give, in which every person in the room shows up with their whole selves, in which every person in the room is left wanting to be a better person because of the experience.

And this is just the beginning …