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| Olita Ogonjo |
The mentoring program employs Olita Ongonjo as its Coordinator and has an office in Dagoretti, a peri-urban area on the outskirts of Nairobi City. Olita works full time as an advocate for water access and sanitation in the impoverished areas surrounding Nairobi and in semi-arid rural areas further west. Olita and the program have also engaged two youth workers, Christopher OJ Martin and John Kori to assist deliver youth focused activities. The scope of the mentoring program and its ability to deliver real outcomes has significantly increased since its inception in 2005.
A major recent highlight in the program was a third facilitation of the ‘Great Nairobi River Youth for the Environment Soccer Tournament’ again a huge success, attracting hundreds of participants from dozens of youth organisations in the Nairobi River catchment. The principal of this event was to use the ever popular vehicle of soccer as a platform to launch the mentoring programs message of environmental health and safe water access. A highlight of the finals day was the distribution of pieces of soccer kit, donated by clubs in the Tweed. Jerseys, shorts, socks boots and balls collected by mentoring program supporters and sent to Kenya are used by poor youth who are not able to afford this basic equipment.
The program now runs as four integrated streams and is shown graphically in the following figure:
A primary task in increasing the target communities access to reliable and safe drinking water and other sanitation services is empowering the community to negotiate with the government to provide services, and wherever possible, become self sufficient in service provision. The mentoring desk works at a grass roots level to provide training in hygiene and sanitation, and is an advocate for the needs of poor families.
Tweed is a highly skilled and well resourced community in all its endeavors, from the technical aspects of urban water infrastructure provision, to the organisation of sporting competitions and implementation of community based conservation projects. There is a strong desire and track record within the program to encourage regular visits of individuals working within the Kenyan arm of the project to Tweed.
Experience shows that mentoring relationships form unprompted where ever and whenever our Kenyan partners meet local activists, and it is these multiple contacts that create the programs depth of commitment. Likewise, visits from Australian project volunteers to Kenya is an invaluable source of information, and inspiration, for those involved but who have never experienced the highs and lows of life in Africa.
Youth is the future, and nowhere is this more apparent than in Kenya, where a very young demographic reflects the ravages of HIV-AIDS on the adult population. The youth community is beset by a chronic lack of opportunity for paid employment, so projects utilising their inherent capacity for optimism and innovation are being brought to bear on environmental clean ups, recycling and river rehabilitation. The mentoring desk is linking sporting, church and social clubs throughout Nairobi and spreading the message of cash for trash. Proceeds and energy have been used to create a small native plant nursery, with trees being used to revegetate waterways and provide shade.
SafeWater is the direct result of over 50 TSC staff making a regular contribution from their wage into an account used for the implementation of infrastructure projects in Kenya. The first 2 SafeWater projects have resulted in a TKMP volunteer taking a Sky Juice water filtration plant to Kenya and commissioning it. The villages assisted have a combined population of up to 2000, all of whom walk to a heavily contaminated dam to collect water each day. Dam water is now filtered and safe. SafeWater has attracted significant support from local businesses and will be an ongoing initiative, using the capacity of the program desk in Kenya to identify priority projects and undertake essential community consultation and pre-commissioning works. It is hoped that a mentoring project volunteer will travel to Kenya each year to oversee the implementation of a SafeWater project, gaining invaluable personal and vocational experience as a result. SafeWater Project 1 is active on the ground as of March 2007, and SafeWater 2 in November 2008.
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