Samantha in Kenya 2010

February 1st 2010

I arrived on Sunday night after getting up at 2.30am (Urgh!). Stayed over in Nairobi then got up early again to catch a flight up to Kisumu where Pamela and her little girl Kiki live. After dropping my bags at their house, I went straight to Mr Matano’s office where he introduced me to Rachael, a student who is accompanying me to help me with translation. Pamela introduced me to Mr Matano when I was in Kenya in December. He is the Project Officer for the Lake Victoria Basin Commission and is in charge of projects in Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania to mobilise community groups to tackle environmental issues. He’s a really genuine and very helpful person.

Matano sent Rachael and I off with his driver to meet a Beech Management Unit (BMU) on the shores of Lake Victoria. I heard from their board about how they try to monitor the fishing activities of the fishermen in their bay to try to ensure that they are not catching the young fish or using poison or cutting papyrus from the wetlands. There are groups like this all along the shores of Lake Victoria that have been set up as part of this project. It’s a huge undertaking and almost entirely funded from membership fees charged from the local communities. Effectively, the communities have been given responsibility for managing a huge communal resource and in many ways it is very effective. Members benefit from services such as the BMU negotiating decent prices for their price on their behalf and sending out rescue boats when they get stranded by very high or low winds. Also, the communities can be more effective at policing the fishing activities because they know the people involved. The authorities just don’t have the manpower to have people on the ground in every beach but can respond when a BMU report someone.

In the afternoon we met with a group of five women followed by five men. We asked them to describe to us all the environmental challenges they face and whether they are getting better or worse as well is who there is to help them cope with those issues. It was quite a depressing picture. Almost all of the problems they reported were getting worse. Unreliable rains, water pollution causing diseases like typhoid, deforestation, declining fish stocks, extreme winds making life very difficult for the fishermen so they get stranded and sometimes drown… And the people themselves were quite suspicious and didn’t really want to open up or participate until I agreed to buy them lunch. It was all quite depressing; it felt that despite the efforts they were making, the problems they faced were so huge, it was like trying to stop an avalanche.

February 2nd

Today, Rachel and I had another ridiculously early morning because we had a three hour drive to do and needed to arrive at the Mara River Users Association before 9am! The people there were much more helpful. The government and WWF had worked to set up community groups responsible for managing water use and tree planting within river basins. There were several groups spaced all along the river, and even a transboundary group to deal with issues between the Tanzanian and Kenyan parts of the river. Again, the groups received very little funding and mainly raised money by selling tree seedlings from their small nursery. Even so, they managed to resolve conflicts over water use, train people in the importance of tree planting and using farming methods and building toilets that prevent silt and sewage from washing into the rivers.

When we spoke to the women and men in the afternoon though, they also reported that most issues they faced were getting worse. Rain has become totally unreliable and not enough to water their crops; diseases have increased; they have to travel much further for water and for firewood. The women even said that in the dry seasons, the springs and rivers have dried up so badly in the last few years that they have to walk most of the day and then sleep overnight at the spring or river in order to get enough drips of water in their bucket before they can come home again. I was totally bowled over and didn’t know what to say. Anyone who doubts that climate change is happening now should come and talk to these people. And they are putting all their efforts into trying to tackle it, setting up community groups and planting trees. Most of them think it is their own fault for chopping down the local trees; they don’t connect what is happening to them with us driving our cars and leaving our heating on high.

Despite all their difficulties though, they were really helpful and seemed happy to tell us about their situation and give us their time. Rachael and I left in Matano’s car, feeling somewhat overwhelmed by the scale of the challenge they, and we, face.

3rd February

Today was another early morning to catch a flight down to Nairobi. We caught a taxi from the airport to the bus station and got a “luxury” shuttle mini bus to Embu. We waited for the bus to fill up (we’d deliberately chosen one that only takes seven passengers so it fills up more quickly) then settled in for the hot, three hour journey. We were slightly delayed when our driver stopped to see if people in a bus that had crashed needed help. People here might not have much, but due to the lack of emergency services, they do stop to help each other if anything goes wrong. It turned out the crashed bus had been heading the other way so they didn’t need a lift and we went on our way.

When we arrived in Embu, we got a taxi and booked into our hotel (£22 for a four poster bed with en suite!) then headed straight out again for a meeting with the Mount Kenya East Pilot Project, again recommended by Matano. We were exhausted but they were so welcoming and helpful, we perked up. Their project also works by mobilising community groups to tackle issues like water use and deforestation. They gave us an overview of their activities in the five water basins in the area and agreed to arrange meetings with community members for us on Friday.

4th February

I think today was the best day so far, although it got off to a bit of a bad start. It turned out that the tea factory we were supposed to visit today was a lot further than I thought and there were no direct buses so we got up really early intending to catch a succession of local buses. My stomach really wasn’t right though and I ended up going back to bed for a bit and asking Rachael to organise for a taxi to take us around for the day. Luckily I felt a lot better by the time we set off at 8am.

The Michimikuru Tea Factory is involved in a climate change adaptation pilot project with Cafedirect and a German organisation, GTZ. It was another long drive – about 2.5hours – but the factory manager, director and project co-ordinator were so welcoming and friendly when we arrived, all my energy came back. Cafedirect realised that many of their suppliers were producing declining quantities of tea and coffee due to the effects of climate change so decided to set up a pilot project to see what they could do about it.

They’ve held workshops to listen to the farmers’ views about the challenges they face, many of which are linked to deforestation and overreliance on tea for income at a time when declining tea prices and subdivision of land is making it increasingly difficult to make a living from tea alone. They’ve therefore started a series of educational programmes to give farmers access to expert knowledge on tree planting and alternative crops and have set up community based groups to educate individual communities and organise the clearing of eucalyptus from the areas near water sources (they suck up all the water), and to replant indigenous species that protect the soil without using all the water.

Although progress is slow sometimes because they can’t access enough funds to grow all the seedlings they want to or to provide the women with more fuel efficient stoves so they don’t need as much firewood, the community leaders that I met seemed very positive about the project and its future prospects. They had lots of plans for extending their tree nursery and their educational programmes to a wider area and said that although the rivers are still lower than they were ten years ago, the removal of the eucalyptus trees has already started to have a noticeable effect which is benefitting the whole community.

I have been overwhelmed by the scale of the challenges people here face, and by their willingness to get involved as volunteers to try to do something about it, even when some of their neighbours might initially be reluctant to help. It really puts our efforts to remember to turn off the lights when we leave a room, to shame!

Anyway, it’s now gone 10pm and I have another early morning tomorrow. We’re off to visit some of the Mount Kenya East Pilot Project community groups and then back to Nairobi before heading to Tanzania over the weekend.

February 5th

Today was a great day. The Mount Kenya East Pilot Project has managed to mobilise so many community groups on a range of environmental issues from water use to deforestation, as well as helping people with income diversification, since much of the environmental destruction locally is caused by poverty, e.g. people taking trees from the forest for timber because their farms aren’t producing enough to support them.

We had a really informative discussion with some of the people responsible for advising the local community groups in which they explained how they set up these self-help community groups and get them to start to take responsibility for whatever the resource is e.g. forest or a water source such as a spring or river. They give them training that enables them to manage finances and conflict resolution as well as technical advice. As the groups grow, we were told that many of them would benefit from registering as co-operatives as it would give them the ability to sue anyone misusing the resource or to buy property e.g. a piece of land from which they could run a tree nursery. Unfortunately, many of the communities are very suspicious of co-ops because so many of the traditional tea and coffee co-ops have become corrupt and they think that the same will happen to them. I can certainly see an opportunity for some co-op training to explain to them that a co-op is their own organisation so it will only become corrupt if they let it, and to give them the skills to prevent it from going down that path.

In the afternoon we were taken to meet a Forestry Community Based Organisation and a Water Users Group. The former had faced some challenges around agreeing how best to go about reforesting an area of degraded forest and hadn’t got the funding they’d hoped for so seemed a bit dejected. The Water Users Group on the other hand were buzzing with ideas and energy. MKEPP had given them technical assistance as long as they provided the man power, to turn a local water spring into a structure with a couple of taps so they could access clean water from it instead of having to use cups to collect the water from the ground.

They didn’t stop there though. They went on to save enough money to build a big fish pond so they can get income from selling the fish. They have now started saving as a group to raise enough money to treat and bottle the water from the spring so they can sell it and earn money that way as well. They’ve also set up a tree nursery and are busy trying to replace many of the trees that have been chopped down over the years for firewood. Although they also reported that the rains were unreliable and they faced a lot of challenges, they also said that since they started these projects, things had started to improve, all be it slowly, and they had lots of energy and enthusiasm for the things they wanted to do in the future.