The Working Week
on It began in Africa (Kenya), 16/Aug/2011 06:22, 34 days ago
Back in Nairobi, back in our little flat in South B, Allys and I are now commuting in to work together and working in the same office. It should be sitcom gold or a recipe for a domestic disaster, but so far so good.KAIHis an advocacy organisation at heart not a microfinance organisation, but their members are amongst the most poor and dispossessed in Kenyan society precisely because they are the parent or guardian of a person with an intellectual disability. Families disown them, mothers or fathers or sometimes both run away, many communities reject them because they believe God has cursed the child and its family. Many schools don't have the capacity or willingness to teach children with any form of disability, forcing children and parents and guardians to remain at home getting by on the most basic subsistence lifestyle.So in this situation, whilst KAIH performs excellently in the field of advocacy, its members have challenged KAIH to help them in the area of economic empowerment. KAIH is a small organisation with not many resources but has received a small amount of funding to start a microfinance project from theNational Council for Persons with Disability(NCPWD). The project is called KAIH Family, because each group works together like a family - and I don’t mean a sitcom-style-bickering and overblown-feuds type family, but people working together and looking out for each other’s best interests, which is enough to put a smile on this cynical, jaded British banker. Most of these groups want to work together on income generating activities that persons with an intellectually disability can take part in: farming projects such as pig, goat and rabbit rearing are all popular.Pig rearing project, Ndmberi, KiambuKAIH Family will be launching across 5 of KAIH’s branches,Nyeri,Migori,Siaya,Kiambu, and Nairobi, which is great from a personal perspective as I will get to visit all these areas quite a bit.Right now, each of those regions has a branch co-ordinator and a regional officer who are excellent at spreading the word of KAIH as an advocacy group, and helping parents organise themselves into support groups. Soon, we will be turning them into microfinance professionals. They will have to deliver a financial literacy and business skills training program to people who have never had a bank account, never saved and never taken a loan. They will have to administer loans, carry out financial assessments and collect debt. There is plenty of enthusiasm from the regions for all this but quite a skills gap which we will bridge together in the coming months.Goat rearing project, NyeriAt the national office, we are working to make sure that as an organisation we lend responsibly and effectively, as the sustainability of this project is at its core.Luckily, help is on the way: we are getting advice on our management information system from Ricky, a volunteer based in Kisumu, and the NCPWD are helping us by training some of our regional officers to become financial literacy trainers, both of which represented huge tasks themselves and each could have been a stand-alone volunteer placement.Unusually for a volunteering placement, there are a whole range of concrete deliverables that need to be in place before I go, which is a huge plus. However, I have to temper my excitement as there are so many challenges and constraints. KAIH is an enthusiasm-rich but resource-poor organisation: every shilling needs to go to loans for the parent support groups, people are very short on time so training and processes are going to be difficult to implement.With all that in the mix, my working week is, as a good friend mine once said: 10% work, 10% hope, 80% frustration.