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.

Open your eyes

here is the documentary that we where asked to watch.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FejzHnFXR-w&NR=1

This document is so frustrating because of the lack of power we have to change this, and so encouraging because it shows the will of young people to make their place better. I don't really know what to think after seeing that, except the fact that it makes you want to help, but with a feeling of helplessness.

It is so amazing to see this kinds of clips or movies, because even if one knows that those situations exists, and even if one already saw these situations, one always end up forgetting this, going back to our civilized countries lives, speeding everything, remaining in our cocoon.


This was just a little reflection following the clip.


Something beautiful is the faith and the joy of life that those people can keep, even when facing such dramatic situations. This is illustrated by this video I found by watching some suggestions following previous one:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H51Jby_2hZI&feature=related 

Waste, a major and difficult challenge of this century

Here comes another big issue faced by today's world, known as Solid Waste Management. full of complexity, it is in developing countries that SWM faces the biggest problems, representing a major public health and environmental concern especially in regards to the poorest part of population.

If the standard way of managing waste in developed countries is generally described as follows

The steps of reducing, reusing and recycling waste are often over passed in poor or developing countries, which leads to dramatic situations. The situation is so critical that the second most serious problem faced by city dwellers is insufficient solid waste management. This doesn't surprise me, because I can imagine the huge amount of work that should be done to manage this problem.

Some info to remember:

• one to two third of  of solid waste generated is not collected
• Total global MSW will increase by 37.3% between 2007 and 2011
• the rate of waste generation generally increases in direct proportion to that of a nation's advance in development. This means that for urbanizing zones, the problem of waste treatment will become bigger and bigger.
• One out of two people living in cities is relatively poor or worst, and therefore directly concerned about waste management of his city
• Municipal solid waste management (MSWM) represent between 20% and 50% of municipal budget. This represents considerable expenses, which explains in my opinion the negligence that municipalities can have in regard to it, without considering the health and ecological impacts, what is a pity.
• Individuals residing near or on disposal sites (illegal) are infected by gastrointestinal parasites, worms and related organisms 

This subject highlight a new challenge that will be faced by developing countries, and in this case especially by urban areas and peri-urban slums. Furthermore, Bad waste management involve water resources contamination, which is already a big problem for those areas. In order to improve life quality of slum dwellers, it is important to take into account not only one part of the challenges, but to conciliate many different and challenging aspects.

I will complete this topic with some solutions that exists to make clever usage of waste, but which need some organisation and some knowledges (biogasification, recycling, etc.)

Water ! How to make your conscience aware of the complexity ?

What best manner to realize a subject is tricky than by being involved in it?

That is the reason why our class was confronted with a realistic problem, namely a water management problem in phnom penh (Cambodia), in order to raise our conscience to the difficulties which exists in getting everyone to agree. I have to say it was not such a big issue during the course, because we were taking the role for only 2 hours, and that we were not real specialists in the subjects treated, so our verve was not so high. We rapidly agreed and were really open to other propositions, trying to get everyone happy. I'm afraid this should not be the case in reality, first of all because people should put their own interests in priority.

however, it was also good to realize which actors are affecting those discussions. unfortunately, 2 hours was a little bit less to fully conclude these discussions.

I found it surprising to hear in the little clip showed about the water problem in Phnom Penh the next sentence:

Rich people don't want to pay for water, because they think everything is due to them

This shows the mentality of people facing the water problem, and the idea that water is not so precious, but just an available resource. I think work should be done in those countries to give some value to water, to make it precious, to raise people conscience.

Water !

What an interesting subject was treated during this two hours lesson. And what an important subject also! I really enjoyed it.

what appears to be the most natural and available resource of the earth will probably be, in the same time, the most delicate and significant purpose of next century discussions. This is maybe the main point to remember from the lecture. And students seems to be aware of that, since 68% of the audience agreed, at the beginning of the lecture, with the next idea:

 

“If the wars of [20th] Century were fought over oil, 

the wars of the [21st] Century will be fought over water…

unless we change our approach to
managing this precious and vital resource”

Ismail Serageldin, World Bank Vice President in 1995

It could have been interesting to ask at the end of the lecture if the opinion of some students changed, but for my part it did not. We got a full overview of the involvement of water in different facets of the world.

Understanding climate changes begins with understanding water cycle.

A really interesting point of view was given about the renewable energy sources. Renewable energies is one of the most discussed subjects nowadays in the context of global energy needs, but what is less talked about is their implication with water. Who ever thought about the fact that 96,3% of the future renewable energy sources rely on water. Indeed, if it is obvious for hydropower, it is important to underline that Bioenergy needs water by the fact that plants needs water to grow.

This gives us a new way of thinking about water, which is not only a first necessity human resource, but also an indispensable tool for human activities. This highlights also the complex way we will have to deal with that resource, and which priority we will have to give to it. The question could be:

Energy growth, with economic background, or clear water for everyone, with health background?

I think the fight will be rude, because money is involved, and unscrupulous people will not hesitate to use water for their own business, instead of thinking "sustainable and social".

Urban risks: weighting discussion on hazards

The conversation begun with some examples known by each one of us about the different hazards in the list. The conversation then already gave importance to some hazards while other ones were already given less importance.

The second step was to organize a manner to rank all the hazards, and to put together our ideas. So that the feelings of everyone should be included, we decided that each one of us had to give importance to the hazards with a percentage. The total had to reach 100%. After that, we mixed all our percentages, and we obtained a really precise ranking, although our personal rankings were only made of 5, 10 or 15 %.

We also had a discussion about what should be more important to take into account; human lives, economic , direct or indirect , long or short term impacts.


I'm from Belgium, and I think that conclusions reached during the course would not be so different. Only the volcanic eruptions and the tsunami would have a smaller importance, but the rest fits very well. This is the fact that our group was composed of a French guy and 2 others from Finland. SO our point of view was kind of "general" European view.