How to involve community participation in Kibera ?

We had a participatory approach about waste management solutions for Kibera. 4 groups had to discuss and to organize the ideas of everyone, which were putted on the walls.

An interesting idea that came up from one of my classmates was the fact that in slums, or in African regions in general, the contact person is not government or municipalities, but most of the time it is a leader, kind of "chief" of a part of the population or region or ethnic group. These guys are the elders. It is like you don't take decisions without their agreement. It was really interesting point of view

The question that our group had to deal with was:

Community participation

How best to mobilize the community to improve their situation, what forms of organisation should be proposed? Propose a mobilization strategy.

Our group propositions are:

1. On field information gathering, in order to plan a hygiene action. contact with people and with the "leaders". It is important to get the point of view of the slums habitants, to know which problems they are facing, in their opinion, not in ours. It is not because a situation is not acceptable for me that it is for someone else. It is really important to be able to put themselves in the place of the other.
2. Get support of the leaders. They have to be convinced of the action we want to take.
3. Raise awareness of people. The mean to do that is to go forward with an "easy to understand idea". The most easy way to reach more people is to talk with easy to afford words, so the plan is to get a motto.

The motto we were thinking about was talking about "death", and "preventing death" thanks to some hygiene actions. The reason is that everybody is interested in his proper life, but if the motto was something like "improve your life quality", less people should care ("my life is ok", " I don't want to make efforts", etc.)

I heard some good and new ideas during this workshop, about leadership in Africa, hierarchy and so on.


During the workshop, I thought about a proposition to involve people in the hygiene problem: there would be some places in the slum where people can bring back their waste, sorted, and they would be paid in function of the weight of the waste they bring back. The waste would then be treated by companies or by municipalities.

One problem that this system involves is that people don't has interest in limiting the amount of waste. But cons they have an interest in cleaning all around. It should be a kind of diverted garbage collector system.