My first week interning couldn’t fairly be described as work; it was more of a whirlwind tour of all the many projects that the organization currently has underway. Beginning with the community water and sanitation project (COWASA), we - that is, myself and Dana, my comrade and fellow intern here (she’s also a fellow McGillian) - were taken around to sites in the Kisumu area where Africa Now has developed a number of deceptively simple solutions to problems of water management.
The great irony of Kisumu is that, despite sitting on the shores of Lake Victoria, the second largest body of fresh water in the entire world (after Lake Superior), the town itself is without clean, running water. There’s currently a massive public works project underway to install pipes throughout the city, but government initiatives are notoriously slow-going. The provincial headquarters for Nyanza, one of the largest buildings in town, currently sits empty and only partially completed, as it has for over ten years – a testament to the corruption of Kenyan bureaucracy. This is where an NGO works best – in cutting through the red-tape and focusing on solid, measurable improvements, it can take the first steps up the development ladder (to rehash a tired and inaccurate analogy – I think development is more like that damned rope we had to climb in gym class that burned like hell and painfully revealed my failings as a human being by they fourth grade) in the hopes that the government will soon get its act together and follow its successfully-proven lead.
Among Africa Now’s various projects aimed at facilitating access to clean water, it has installed these large concrete water tanks at many local primary and secondary schools, which are designed to catch rainwater run-off from roofs, storing it safely for the duration of the dry season; they’ve also built running springs in locations where stagnant, unsanitary groundwater wells once stood, thus providing a natural source of clean water to communities. Inevitably, all this brought out the IDS nerd in me, and I quickly bonded with Haron, Africa Now’s water technician and the engineer for all of these water facilities. He was given the unenviable charge of taking us around and answering all of my many hydrologically-challenged questions, which he did with enormous patience and often with frightening amounts of detail – for example, its undesirable to locate a new spring site in an area with too many eucalyptus trees, as their roots tend to soak up too much ground water; instead, banana trees are preferred for their more fibrous roots, which actually help to store water in the dry season. A masterful teacher and peaceful traveling companion, Haron earned my respect and admiration almost immediately.
In addition to the water sites, I’ve also visited a dairy goat research center - dairy goats, as opposed to dairy cows, being more cost efficient and practical in impoverished regions, as they require much less grazing land and can produce relatively large quantities of milk; a bee-keeping farm that raises honey to be distributed and sold through major regional supermarkets; a community training session on good governance, which was run more like a university lecture than the PTA-type meeting I was expecting; a number of fishing communities on Rusinga Island (about a 3 hour drive from Kisumu along the banks of Lake Victoria); and last, but certainly not least in my mind, I’ve been to see the village banks.
These are functioning, operational banks that are open for business in small rural areas, each run by a board of directors composed mostly of women from the local community. Most are being actively, enthusiastically used by locals to hold their sometimes-meager (yet all the more important) savings. In addition to encouraging savings practices, the village banks, or financial service associations (FSAs), also allow community members to take out small loans that can be used to help sustain or grow business operations. In addtion to the basic saving and loaning services offered, the banks provide villagers with the opportunity to open accounts to pay for school fees, to become shareholders (which entitles them to receive dividends and vote on bank policies), and to hold pension accounts. Though the principles of micro-finance may seem a bit dry when you read them out of a textbook (or in a blog, for that matter), seeing them in action, completely changing the way entire communities behave with regard to planning for the future and expanding their farms or businesses, is both inspiring and somewhat overwhelming.
Yeah, I’m a huge econ dork; but perhaps more pertinent to this discussion, I’m also generally a cynic when it comes to the possibilities for improvement and development in the poorest areas of the world. Africa, with its chronic underdevelopment and perpetual excuse-making, be it corruption, culture, or colonialism, is particularly inviting of this cynicism. But these banks look to be a bright spot on the bleak landscape of development policy-making. That’s not to say that they are the single solution to the troubles of the developing world (the “magic bullet”, as Jeffrey Sachs would term it), and they certainly have their fair share of issues to deal with, but that’s what I’m hopefully here to help with.
It's such a relief to feel as though there’s something I can actually do here to make things a little better. It seems almost too easy when working in developing areas to get mired in good-intentions, and ultimately do little in the way of making effective progress. Looking back on my attitude before coming here, I very much feared the worst and accepted that my trip could well be a waste in terms of tangible results (though certainly not in terms of gaining personal experience). That said, I’m genuinely encouraged by the potential for improvement that my time in Kenya appears to offer, and hopefully I’ll be able to do something worthwhile with my limited knowledge and, yes, with my good intentions.
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