The terminal neglect of Northern Kenya (and some pastoral remedies)

“Perhaps no other livelihood system has suffered more from biased language and narratives than pastoralism.” Peter D. Little

Disease area

Known as the Northern Frontier Districts (NFD) during the colonial era, North Eastern Province (NEP) from 1963-2013 and now the Frontier Counties Development Council (FCDC) region in the post-devolution period from 2013, it includes the Northern Rift in the northwest of Kenya, the NFD/NEP to the north and east and the southeastern Tana and Lamu counties, making up about two-thirds of the country. 

This arid and semi-arid region is associated with mobile pastoralism – the nation's largest supplier of meats (beef, mutton, chevon), camel milk, animal hides and skins – contains significant numbers and varieties of wildlife in generally natural and open rangelands, is adjacent to the Indian Ocean and borders all countries around Kenya apart from Tanzania, signifying its strategic importance to the economy, security and diplomacy of the country.

Tracing sources of the malaise 

The underdevelopment of the Frontier Counties can be understood through an epidemiological (study of the spread of disease) lens. John Snow’s map of the 1854 cholera outbreak in the Soho District of London – which hypothesised that germ-contaminated water was the source of the epidemic – is a good place to start.

By pin-pointing the incidence of sickness and deaths in the district and overlaying the dots around water sources in the general area of the outbreak, Dr Snow was able to observe a concentration of effects around a single water pump and when tested, the water from this source contained the cholera-causing contamination. This seminal visual communication study is regarded as the founding event of epidemiology.

Policy and political contamination 

The tone and attitude towards the Frontier Counties was set by Sessional Paper No. 10 of 1965 (SP 10’65) during the first post-independence government of President Jomo Kenyatta (1963-1978), two key paragraphs of which are quoted below:

SP 10’65, p46, para133 (note the underlined): 

One of our problems is to decide how much priority we should give in investing in less developed provinces. To make the economy as a whole grow as fast as possible, development money should be invested where it will yield the largest increase in net output. This approach will clearly favour the development of areas having abundant natural resources, good land and rainfall, transport and power facilities and people receptive to and active in development.

SP 10’65, p47, para136 (note the underlined): 

Today some of the provinces and districts that have genuine economic potential remain underdeveloped simply because the people will not accept new ways and the necessary discipline of planned and co-ordinated development. In these areas a concerted and prolonged effort to overcome prejudices and suspicions is needed before development can take place.

Effects

Approved by cabinet and passed by parliament in 1965, political attitude followed government policy set out by SP 10'65 as Odhiambo (2014, 2013) has observed. The neglect of the region which festered within the implementing civil service and provincial administration endured even when political actors changed and new development plans were drawn. This may explain the persistence of the mind-set that Frontier Counties were a bad investment because the people were not receptive to nor active in "development" – a sentiment which stubbornly adhered to successive administrations for 40 years. 

According to Hassan, Kanyinga and Nathan (2023):

This [thinking was] based partially on a lengthy record of failed development interventions among pastoralists (Dyer 2013; Fratkin 1997; Niamir-Fuller 1999). According to Simpson and Waweru (2021), the colonial administration found Samburu district [for example] less productive and not what they preferred - ‘government on the cheap’. The independent government pursued the same thinking as the colonial administration – viewing the land occupied by pastoralists as ‘devastated by overgrazing’ (Simpson and Waweru 2021). This then meant there were no substantial development projects, thus further marginalising Samburu and other communities in northern Kenya (Waweru 2012).

The marginalisation continued after independence (Markakis 1987), as the new government also did not invest in any substantial programmes for education, social amenities or development that would fit the mobile communities like pastoralists (Turton 1972). In some instances, lawmakers … simply failed to understand and recognise pastoralism as a mode of production that suit[ed] existing communities’ lifestyle and environment. The lack of support for pastoral practices and the exclusion of the region from development projects added to the marginalisation of northern Kenya (Markakis 2004).

Yet, pastoralist communities had their own customary practices and norms that governed their access of land and resources (Okoth-Ogendo 2002). While pastoralists relied on reciprocal arrangements of access and negotiated access among their communities and outside their kinship ties (Fratkin 2001), most of the government efforts and policies on land were in line with the land use of settled agricultural communities [i.e., in “high potential areas”]. What was lacking in many of these instances was a proper understanding of pastoralism as a mode of production suitable for the environment [i.e., “low potential areas”]. The effect is seen in the subsequent debates about the viability of pastoralism and suggestions on the need to transform the practice.

According to Niamir-Fuller (1999), governments and international development organisations have failed to consider and meet pastoral peoples’ needs and to accommodate their unique mode of production. In general, there is agreement that policies in Kenya have failed to fully secure pastoralists’ access to rangelands and mobility and to support their livestock and by that secure their livelihoods. The attitude towards pastoralists’ choice of livelihood and their mode of production also implies that most of the interventions developed for these communities are not in tandem with the pastoralist’s aspirations and key aspects of their livelihood, like mobility.

Little (2013) adds:

Perhaps no other livelihood system has suffered more from biased language and narratives than pastoralism. Some of the worst misperceptions equate pastoralism with poverty, violence, illegal trade, economic inefficiency, ineffective tenure systems, environmental degradation, hunger and food aid dependency, and/or ‘vacant’ wastelands. These discourses have important political, policy, and practical implications and, as this book has shown, can be invoked to justify particular actions by the state. These directives include the sedentarization of pastoralists in settlements, the allocation of pastoralist lands to investors and conservation groups, and/or the imposition of land titling programmes for both pastoralists and non-pastoralists. In the past, one might attribute these misinformed narratives, policies, and programmes to ignorance on the part of governments. However, the massive amounts of money, powerful interests, and personal benefits (‘rents’) currently associated with some of these actions, such as the leasing or sale of pastoral lands, point to more sinister motivations on the part of state officials. Hidden in these narratives also are political agendas that perceive mobile pastoralism as a security and political threat to the state and, therefore, in need of controlling or eliminating. In sum, the continued existence of powerful and harmful narratives about pastoralism requires persistent efforts to counter them, such as the recent work on economic contributions of pastoralism that Behnke and Muthami (2011) and Behnke and Kerven (this book) have pursued.

Accurate diagnosis

It appears evident that the neglect of Northern Kenya was in large part driven by its association with pastoralists and their production systems. When you consider the economic, ecological and cultural identity cases for pastoralism, you realise that the natural landscapes and resources of the region on the one hand and ethnic peoples and their traditional practices on the other are the very limited means to usefully exploit and manage arid and semi-arid lands. 

Attempts at treatment (relevant policy, programme and project prescriptions)

President Daniel arap Moi (1978-2002): 

District Focus for Rural Development; Department for Rural Planning; tarmacking of major roads outside the main urban areas; Turkwel Gorge Hydroelectric Power Station (in a Frontier County).

President Mwai Kibaki (2002-2013, perhaps the best attempt at redress):

Economic Recovery Strategy for Wealth and Employment Creation; Ministry of State for Northern Kenya and other Arid Areas; Constituency Development Fund (CDF); Kenya Vision 2030 including LAPSSET (Lamu Port-South Sudan-Ethiopia transport corridor); Isiolo-Moyale highway (LAPSSET); Isiolo International Airport (LAPSSET); Vision 2030 Development Strategy for Northern Kenya and other Arid Lands; presidency coincides with the new Constitution of Kenya 2010 which set up the landmark devolved system of governance.

President Uhuru Kenyatta (2013-2022): 

Berth 1 at Lamu Port (LAPSSET); Big 4 Agenda (housing, food security, manufacturing, universal healthcare).

President William Ruto (2022-): 

Bottom-up Economic Transformation Agenda (with a focus on agriculture, MSMEs, affordable housing and settlements, healthcare, digital superhighway, creative industries); State Department for the ASALs and Regional Development.

Policy doses over time

Current post-treatment conditions (pastoralism specific) 

Localised FCDC therapies (adapted for pastoralism)

Condition A & C above – likely to remain pastoral producers and main users of rangeland BUT ONLY IF the distance dimension (see FCDC nd: p21-23 and 28-31) is addressed with infrastructure to support mobility, production and connectivity to local, domestic and export markets as well as education, health (including animal health), water & sanitation, housing, energy and communication services (the six foundations for development) which may remain concentrated in population centres before mobile / remote delivery and sales channels are better developed to serve nomadic populations, e.g., by operationalising the National Council on Nomadic Education in Kenya and the Livestock Marketing Board, outcomes of the post-2003 ASAL policy initiatives (see Elmi and Birch 2013).

Condition B & D above – likely to move to growing FCDC towns like Isiolo, Marsabit, Moyale and Garissa thus addressing the density dimension (see FCDC nd: p21-23 and 28-31); these pastoral segments could be ‘pulled’ into economically integrated and socially supported urban livelihoods BUT ONLY IF service delivery institutions to provide education, health, water & sanitation, housing, energy and communication services are developed and expanded in these towns to accommodate pastoral out-migration.

Case notes

Catley, A., Lind, J. and Scoones, I. (Eds). (2013) Pastoralism and development in Africa: Dynamic change at the margins. Abingdon: Routledge.

Elmi, M. and Birch, I. (2013) Creating Policy Space for Pastoralism in Kenya. Future Agricultures, Working Paper No. 068. Brighton: Future Agricultures Consortium

Frontier Counties Development Council. (nd) Socio-economic blueprint for the Frontier Counties Development Council: Towards a regional and territorial approach for local development. Nairobi: FCDC.

Hassan, R., Kanyinga, K. and Nathan, I. (2023). No Option but to Settle! The Community Land Act, Devolution and Pastoralism in Samburu County, Kenya. Nomadic Peoples 27: 292–314.

Lind, J., Okenwa, D. and Scoones, I. (Eds). (2020) Land, investment and politics: Reconfiguring Eastern Africa’s pastoral drylands. Suffolk: James Currey.

Little, P. (2013) Reflections on the Future of Pastoralism in the Horn of Africa. p243-249. In: Catley, A., Lind, J. and Scoones, I. (Eds). Pastoralism and development in Africa: Dynamic change at the margins. London: Routledge.

Odhiambo, M. (2014) The Unrelenting Persistence of Certain Narratives: An Analysis of Changing Policy Narratives about the ASALs in Kenya. International Institute for Environment and Development Country Report. London: IIED.

Odhiambo, M. (2013) Moving beyond the rhetoric: the challenge of reform in Kenya’s drylands. London: IIED

Republic of Kenya. (2012) Vision 2030 Development Strategy for Northern Kenya and other Arid Lands. Nairobi: Government Printer.

Republic of Kenya. (2010) Sessional paper No.8 of 2012 on National Policy for the Sustainable Development of Northern Kenya and other Arid Lands “Releasing our Full Potential.” Unpublished.

Republic of Kenya. (1965) Sessional No. 10 of 1965 – African Socialism and its Application to Planning. Nairobi: Government Printer.

The photograph at the top was taken by the author in Kakuma, Turkana County, in June 2014. If is of an open-air church built with soil and earth bricks - the structure with the cross is the altar and the grave-like rows are the pews.

The story of an action research project (II)

 Chapter 2: An old friend comes to the rescue

The GSD application required three referees. It was decent to let them know its fate. Later in the first week of March 2022, I shot emails to the three of them. Only one responded.

Richard Atkinson had worked for a UK-based research agency and then his own firm for over two decades. Our paths had crossed when he had come to Kenya in the 2000s to undertake what became annual lifestyle trend studies for Nokia, the then dominant mobile phone manufacturer. Between 2007 and COVID-19, Richard, his colleagues and I would conduct dozens of research projects in Liberia, Côte d'Ivore, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda, Malawi, Botswana and Mozambique for a raft of tech, NGO and business clients. At the time of the GSD application, Richard was teaching in the School of Design at the Royal College of Art (RCA) in London.

Richard in our research bunker at Mpala

Richard had obtained his PhD from Oxford University with a thesis on youth culture. Having been a quant – you should flip through my PhD thesis from page 83 – he had introduced me to ethnographic research and I was hooked. 

Professorial in mannerisms and looks – forgetful, a bit disorganised, knowledgeable, well read, bearded and with a mop of unruly hair going grey, he once appeared in our 'research bunker' with totally unmatched socks and couldn't find his sneakers on his way out, and on the final night, he left in driving rain with an umbrella and saucepan, the latter to fend off any wild animals on his walk back to his bungalow – he could turn a half hour conversation into 10 pages of text. He had been writing a book over the previous eight years based on his research experiences in Europe, Asia, the Americas and Africa. When Communities Design Aid: Creating Solutions to Poverty That People Own, Use and Need was published in 2022 and details when and why development aid doesn’t work and concludes with proposals for community-led “Participative Development Goals.” 

Unsurprisingly, he was game – his response to my initial email included lines like “this work needs to be done…” and “give me a couple of months to think something up…” 

Sometime in May, he got back with a plan – he would start scouring UK research funding websites, in particular the UKRI Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) one, for relevant grant calls. Soon, this search would identify a call to do with research with indigenous researchers and peoples. This appeared relevant given that the 2020-2023 drought had affected traditional pastoralists in Northern Kenya to a great and devastating extent. 

We began working on the bid document whose deadline was 9 August 2022, the same day as national elections in Kenya. I hit the books and journal papers once again, this time with some authority because I now considered myself an agri-pastoralist with an intense exposure to it vagaries in those dozen years in Umande where the farm was located in Laikipia East. 

Richard had recruited two RCA colleagues from the School of Design soon after the start of this proposal writing: John Makepeace, a specialist in futures methods and Gareth Loudon, Professor of Creativity and head of its Innovation Design Engineering and Global Innovation Design programmes. Zoom meetings between the four of us and Richard’s prolific writing generated pages of Google Doc text. A budget outline was beginning to take shape in the hands of John. As the Principal Investigator, Gareth’s experience, wisdom and calm delivery guided the team forward but as 9 August approached, we realised we had so much more to do and could not possibly meet the deadline. Richard, ever so sensitive, called me to ask how I felt about this. I don’t know what I said. I knew how I felt – my future looked bleaker just as the presidential and Laikipia gubernatorial election results would mirror.

We regrouped at the start of 2023. This time, the RCA team opted to go for an open call. This is a research proposal which may not fall within the specific themes put out by the research councils; applicants could conceive a project within the general remit of the council and not necessarily in response to a specific ‘brief’. There are no hard deadlines which probably informed what was to become the Future Pastoralism research proposal and project.

We identified Laikipia North as the location for the prospective work. After almost a year-long search for a local research institution for RCA to partner with, I reached out to Mpala Research Centre & Wildlife Foundation, also in Laikipia North. MRC sits within the 48,000 acre Mpala Ranch. The land was bequeathed to Princeton University by an alum in the 1980s and has been a landscape-level “living laboratory” for Princeton staff and students ever since as well as a site for local natural science researchers. It is jointly managed and operated under a trust by Princeton University, Smithsonian Institution, Kenya Wildlife Service, National Museums of Kenya and the Wildlife Research and Training Institute.

MRC is a very active and productive research institution – at the last count, they were publishing scholarly papers at the average rate of about one article each week. In 2023, they were embarking on a new strategic path which included a master plan to expand and improve physical infrastructure, hiring C-level staff and broadening the scope of research undertaken to include the humanities and social sciences. When I first contacted the newly installed Executive Director, Dr Winnie Kiiru, in March to match-make MRC and RCA, she told me that an arts / design / humanities project with the college was “music to [her] ears.” The RCA team were, later in the year, to receive an internal research development grant to fund a pilot study which we undertook in October and November 2023 working out of MRC.

John and the local research facilitation team with a participant during fieldwork in Il Motiok, Laikipia North

The story of an action research project (I)

Chapter 1: The Harvard GSD application

Like much of the world outside China, COVID-19 arrived in Kenya during March 2020. It could have killed me or my business. Forgivingly, it chose to do the latter.

I had maintained a research office in Nanyuki since September 2013 after emigrating from Nairobi. The small town sits on the Equator and was the headquarters of Laikipia County at the time. We were able to go into the office every weekday and some weekends until December 2020 when the landlady requested us to vacate. The hospitality business in which compound the office was located had closed down. She wanted to renovate the whole place. Admittedly, I was not reluctant to leave and get in her way.

2020 was also the start of one of the driest and longest droughts in Kenya in almost 40 years. Northern Kenya, that half of the country north of the Equator, is generally arid and bore the brunt of the drought which was to last until 2023. Grounded by the pandemic and working from home, I witnessed the effects of this particular drought at close quarters. 

We had had two previous periods of extreme dry weather in my part of Laikipia since buying the small farm in 2010. The first, around 2014, had dried up fishponds with hundreds of tilapia. Dark-to-light grey on the top, this fish tends to turn over and expose the white underside when they die. The ponds had turned cloudy.

The second drought came around in 2017. We led the cattle, goats and sheep into the fruit orchard – bananas, oranges, mangoes – and trees planted over the previous seven years. During these two droughts, I was commuting to work or away on research assignments so could not count myself as an eye witness to these events. This time, in 2020, there was nowhere to go. 

  

Views of Laikipia

Laikipia East is close to the Northwest slopes of Mt Kenya. It is under the mountain’s rain shadow and receives a less-than-adequate amount of rainfall most years. Precipitation is less in frequency and volume in most parts of Northern Kenya. This drought – as in the previous two – had dried the river which forms the northern border of the farm and from which our community water project draws its supplies. The two large elevated tanks fed by the community-sourced water and two smaller rainwater collection tanks connected to the roof of my little house were soon depleted.

The livestock had chewed – to the roots – much of the pasture on the main grazing paddock and were now browsing in the drought reserve area made up of tall grasses and shrubs. The hayfield we had planted in 2019 after the first two droughts produced a decent amount of bales – 120 – slightly less that half of which had been sold to a neighbour. The animals were soon to consume what was left.

Herders in Lekiji, Laikipia North

Amidst this climatic onslaught, I wondered how the pastoralist of Northern Kenya were fairing. Reports of animal deaths had begun appearing on mainstream and social media. Raids by pastoralists on private ranches, conservancies and farms and human deaths and injuries had been documented by investigative journalists. 

Designer and activist Victor Papanek has written about “ecological illiteracy,” describing how humans degrade natural environments expecting the damage to fix itself. Restoration of land and livelihoods gets a lot tougher when the circularity of human activity and the environmental consequences of it – by way of droughts and floods for instance – converge. It was in this milieu that I wrote, over November and December 2021, an application to join Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design (GSD). 

Since my graduate student days in the early 2000s, I had occasionally – probably once a year – popped open the GSD website and marvelled at the faculty members, student profiles, facilities and programmes at the GSD. Nothing more. This time though, I went in deep. With a bias towards architecture and urban planning, there were showcases of environmental design projects as well as many other topical practice areas. 

And then there was the DDes (Doctor of Design) programme. Applications were open, closing in December with March 2022 set as the date for acceptance notices. All you had to do was write a research proposal, craft a personal statement and pay a fee. 

I hit the books and journal articles, reading up on the effects of global warming in drylands, the impacts of biodiversity loss and land degradation on wildlife habitats and pastoralists production systems, land regeneration techniques and "ecologically intentional design" (after Nathan Stegall’s philosophy). I intended to explore natural, designed and social routes to the restoration of large expanses of environmentally degraded habitats. In other words, to manipulate architecture, design and people in the service of environmentally distressed Northern Kenya. 

Having no background in and spotty knowledge of many of these fields, I reflected upon what I considered credible accounts of the most recent droughts in Kenya with my farm as the crime scene. The application generalised the effects of these droughts on Northern Kenya and what I could do about it.

On 1 March 2022, the email from GSD popped into my inbox. The message was not in the body of the email; no, you had to log into the application portal. Before doing this, I went outside and sat on the veranda, asking myself what needed to be done – at a practical level – if it was positive and what were the consequences to my professional life if it was negative. Having steeled myself, I went back indoors and logged in. The message began, “Dear Havi: We regret to inform you…” 

I stepped outside again and contemplated what I would do with the rest of my life, COVID-19 having shuttered by social research practice which I had run since 2011.

Architecture and us

In the mid-1990s, Jeremy Myerson, then Professor of Contemporary Design at De Montfort University in Leicester, England, said – quite off-handedly – that “to understand design, study architecture” during a MA Design & Manufacture course I was attending there at the time. He was using ‘design’ in the context of graphic, fashion, product, industrial, communication, interactive media, environmental, architectural and allied disciplines. It was a simple yet profound statement and because these design activities are in the realm of cultural production – alongside visual and performing art, literature, crafts and the like – the corollary to this advise has implications on the quality of architecture and what it says about the society which designs it, builds it and tolerates it.

The African Design Magazine edited by Gregg Cocking and published in South Africa showcases architectural projects from around the continent and further afield which display attributes of what good design in this structural manifestation should encapsulate – consideration of physical and cultural context, mindful of users, appropriate in terms of construction materials and the building’s purpose, innovative especially in restating what a building ought to be or should look like and aesthetically pleasant among other factors.

If we tick off these attributes when looking at what has been built around us, we should come to the conclusion that design – in all its manifestations – is in competent hands and that the quality of Kenya’s cultural products reflect a creative society with tasteful standards, a people attentive to aesthetics, context, materials, purpose and users.

Which brings me to Ncece Lodge in Nanyuki, Laikipia County, Kenya. Up until around 2014, this was the tallest building – six floors in all – in this town of about 30,000 inhabitants. It still dominates one end of the town’s main street, houses on its ground floor one of the busiest supermarkets in town and stands at the junction of Kenyatta Highway and Laikipia Road which leads to the Kenya Air Force (KAF) and British Army Training Unit in Kenya (BATUK) military bases for which Nanyuki is best known for. As such, if we are to understand design in Laikipia – and Kenya in general – this building is an appropriate architectural specimen to study due to it local prominence, stature and pioneering spirit.

Ncece Lodge in Nanyuki, Laikipia County, Kenya: buildings in Kenya don’t come more ugly than this one and what this says about us as a society is more profound and far-reaching than what this edifice suggests about the state of architecture in Kenya. (Photo by author)

Let's just take its windows and exterior and see how Nanyuki’s ‘Twin Towers’ stacks up with regard to one of those 'good design' attributes – the one concerning aesthetics which asks the question, “is it appealing or beautiful?” I choose aesthetics because there is evidence that when architects pay attention to a building’s context, materials, purpose and its users, the structure ends up looking good, an outcome captured in the well-worn dictum, “form follows function.”

This building has up to six different window shapes and sizes – what purpose does this variation serve? Certainly not an aesthetic one given the visual assault that this variety delivers to the horizontal order of the structure. The windows also do not align vertically, adding to more visual noise. This clutter is magnified in the lower parts of the towers which appear to have a more polished, outer finish, suggesting that had this work been completed to the top, the overall structural dissonance would have been more pronounced.

There are three rectangular protrusions, one on the bottom left, the other in the middle between the towers and the other on top of the left tower. These structures, because of their angular shapes, are unsympathetic to the dominant cylindrical form of the towers and add to more visual noise. The one on top of the left tower holds two cylindrical plastic water tanks – why build rectangular housing for cylindrical tanks? Why does what appears to be an air vent or drainage pipe run halfway up/down one tower then cross over to the next and continue on its journey?

We could pose more questions but even from an ever-so-brief visual examination of Ncece Lodge, we observe a building with no outer rhythm and whose ugliness is a result of irrationality – this building just does not make design sense. If form follows function, we would expect that the interior to be just as disorderly; it is no wonder that the towers appear uninhabited yet the lodge has been standing at that corner for about two decades which suggests it also does not make financial sense. 

If we accept that the cultural products of a society reflect its tastes, inclinations and preferences, then Ncece Lodge displays how loud, vulgar and pretentious Laikipia in particular and Kenya in general can be, national characteristics which we witness all too often on our roads, within our homes, malls, trading centres and stadiums and in our politics. Our built environment is a reflection of us. 

A confluence of ideals and abilities: reflecting upon the Acumen Fellowship year

Scene setting
A population boom in a country with underdeveloped, and hence underproductive, rural areas and inhospitable and overcrowded cities and towns will be an unforgiving reality for Kenya in the next 10-15 years. Envisage 65 million people from the current 46m, 70% of whom will be living in urban centres characterised by “idle and poorly educated youth living in sprawling urban [slums]” as described by Nick Wachira in an article in the journal Kenyan Affairs in which he paints the population picture of Kenya in 2025 and beyond. He goes on to add that, “[even] though the basic human development indicators are projected to improve, the alleviation of mass poverty and suffering will just be marginal.” It is ironic that the article, published in 2011, is titled "Pathway to Development."

It is likely that this scenario will play out in other Eastern Africa countries given the population forecasts - Burundi reaching 17m in 2030 from the current 11m, Ethiopia 138m from 99m, Rwanda 16m from 11.6m, Tanzania 83m from 53.5m and Uganda 62m from 39m (source: World Population Prospects, 2015 Revision). 

Migration mitigation
Rural-to-urban flight is driven primarily by the lack of employment, occupational and entrepreneurial opportunities in the former and the perception that these are available and abundant in the latter. This migration is made more justifiable by the general state of rural areas which are characterised by poor-quality built environments, degraded natural ecosystems and hard-to-reach and often inferior-quality services including education, health, transport and recreation. This phenomenon – moving out of tough, unyielding rural areas to urban centres which under-deliver on their promise of a better life – is what could result in the marginal improvement of living standards over the next decade. We at the Tafaria cHub (creative hub), based at Tafaria Castle in rural Nyandarua County, Kenya, looked at this picture and did not like what we saw. We were also convinced that these negative outcomes were not inevitable.

One of the ways to counteract this trend is to make rural areas anything but what is described above. Rural areas can be aesthetically pleasing; one just has to travel to the English countryside to see how nature can be sculptured to beautiful effect. They can be sites for alternative occupational pursuits and unconventional employment and entrepreneurial opportunities – the creative and cultural industries (visual and performing arts, writing and publishing, audio-visual media production, design and other creative services, traditional cultural expression and heritage etc.) – being examples of such avenues. Integrating these twin objectives into the physical and social fabric of the particular site can produce iconic architecture and hospitable, inviting environments – Tafaria Castle and the many lodges spread around the country’s game parks, reserves and conservancies are examples of this adaptation. The aim would be to develop an alternative rural narrative in which beauty and opportunity are deployed as anchors for population retention and rural revitalisation.

Acumen arrives
The challenge we faced at cHub, which is run by the Tafaria Foundation in partnership with Kuona Trust, was integrating social good with commercial imperatives while bearing above aim in mind. Acumen is one of the better places to learn how this can be successfully accomplished. Acumen’s social investments are geared towards tackling poverty through market solutions. In her book, The Blue Sweater: Bridging the Gap Between Rich and Poor in an Interconnected World published in 2009, Acumen’s founder Jacqueline Novogratz describes how she identified this sweet spot, halfway between charity on the one hand and markets on the other, which she called “patient capital”.

The Acumen Fellowship, which I attended in 2015, has helped cHub travel this route. The Fellowship begins with a series of readings which demonstrate that many people before us have imagined a better world and contemplated the consequences of an unjust and an unequal one; to use a phrase from Acumen’s manifesto, these philosophers, writers and politicians – Plato, Gandhi, Mandela, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Thomas Hobbes, Ibn Khaldun, Martin Luther King, China Achebe, Aung San Suu Kyi, Lee Kuan Yew, Amartya Sen and others – have had “the audacity to imagine the world as it could be.” It helped that Jacqueline Novogratz facilitated these readings in person.

 

Acumen Founder and CEO Jacqueline Novogratz receiving a gift from an East Africa Fellow, Anthony Mulli, the designer of the necklace he is putting around her neck. His social enterprise, Katchy Kollections, which he set up at the age of 16, employs women from Nairobi's slum areas who produce handcrafted fashion-wear and travel accessories for sale; this helps the women improve their circumstances while maintaining the commercial viability of the firm (picture by the author).

Lifelong learning
As suggested earlier, it was similar idealism which allowed cHub to look at the grim predictions enumerated at the beginning of this article and conclude that the consequences were avoidable. A useful operational framework of getting to the real work was provided via a seminar on Adaptive Leadership which distinguishes tough challenges from technical problems. Getting assignments done or projects going is often stymied by a myopic focus on mundane issues whose resolution is as easy as turning on a light bulb. This is work-avoidance but as soon as you determine what the essential task is – the adaptive challenge – you should be on our way and with a little help from the rest of the seminars, informatively so.

I am both a market researcher and information designer. As a researcher, the imperative to involve users for who you are creating or modifying a service or product comes naturally but as a designer, this is not normal practice – creatives think they know what users, viewers or audiences want and rarely involve them when developing ideas or fashioning products. Human-Centred Design (HCD) is a tool which brings research practice into the design process. The prototyping phase of HCD was the most amenable to a creative like me – we love building stuff and are pretty good at it too; as such, distilling a complex, social enterprise idea into a minimum viable product and testing the prototype among potential users, viewers and audiences demonstrated the ease with which research and design, the new R&D, could come together with beneficial effect.

On a personal, pedagogic level, this has been the singular reminder: I began the Fellowship just before I turned 51 years; I have a PhD in Visual Communication; I have taught design courses at universities in Kenya, United Kingdom and South Africa since the mid-1990s; I have served research clients from these countries on assignments in many parts of Sub-Saharan Africa since 1999; yet, it has been invigorating and humbling and sobering to gain the knowledge and understanding and courage to go forth and do 'the work'; if there was any proof required to signify that learning is a lifelong undertaking, the Fellowship has delivered on this.

Global goals
The fuller benefit of the Fellowship, however, has been its ability to engender "moral imagination: the humility to see the world as it is, and the audacity to imagine the world as it could be," tempered by the realities of placing plans, projects and programmes within social, economic, cultural, ecological, ethical and technological contexts. For example, the seminars on Design Thinking, Theory of Change and Systems Thinking introduced frameworks for assessing social impact; Design Thinking is a discourse which recognises design as a problem-solving endeavour – it was from Design Thinking that Human-Centred Design emerged, in effect putting people at the centre of what we do; Theory of Change tests assumptions made about the predicted or anticipated impact of a social investment while Systems Thinking projects the investment's effect on the wider society.

I have attempted to demonstrate the fulsomeness and utility of the Acumen Fellowship especially as it relates to an audacious idea, the problem which it is attempting to solve and the leverage of existing knowledge: a confluence of ideals and abilities. I have observed the same convergence among my fellow East Africa Fellows which goes to show the open-minded, albeit rigorous, nature of Acumen's selection process, which it must maintain if it is to build the next generation of social sector leaders, this being the goal of Acumen's regional and global Fellowship programmes.

Tafaria Castle: architecture as a metaphor for social, economic and environmental conquest

When one comes upon Tafaria Castle, there is a sense of incredulity – what is a European medieval building doing in rural Kenya? The structure is not very large but its location at the crest of a long climb, which goes on towards the Aberdare Range, makes it imposing. The land surrounding the castle was once a white-owned ranch during Kenya’s colonial period but has now been settled by many Kenyan families including that of the castle's owner. It is his life’s story that lends meaning to the architecture of Tafaria Castle.

Tafaria Castle - the Aberdare Range is in the background (photo by the author)

George Tafaria Waititu’s family settled in the area in 1980, the pioneer Africans to do so, when he had just began school. One of nine siblings brought up by a single mother, he spent his early years here, walking to and from school, herding livestock, fetching water and doing the chores expected of most rural folk. Being the only life he knew, growing up was fun and there was plenty of time to play and dream, notwithstanding the modest home, physical exertion and remoteness of the area. “We had a lot of dreams and amazingly, we always dreamt of wanting to transform or change this place, never mind that one would have no idea how that would be done,” he told me during an interview in 2012, a few months before the opening.

I had just returned to Nairobi from a visit to the construction site and that incredulity had driven me ask for an explanation of what he was building and why. There was no doubt that a lot of thinking had gone into the design of the main and surrounding buildings and grounds but the medieval theme seemed totally out of place.

Kenya is not known for good architecture; the country is strewn with pretentious mimicry and frankly ugly and dangerous buildings. One just needs to visit the financial and corporate heartland of Upper Hill, Nairobi, to see the uglification of Kenya. In the lower part of that hill, at the corner of Bunyala and Lower Hill Roads, stand two of the most hideous edifices – the Co-op Trust Tower and Imperial Bank Building. You would have thought that after Kencom House, a battleship run aground smack in the middle of the city in 1978, we would have hit the bottom of the creative trough especially when this monstrosity is seen against the iconic Kenyatta International Conference Centre of five years earlier; but these two more recent buildings and many more coming up around the country illustrate that we are not done yet.

It has not always been this way. Two recent books, A brief tour of the buildings of Nairobi by Yuko Iwatani and Evelyne Wanjiku, self-published in 2010, and Nairobi in pictures: political icons 1899-2000 by Dr. Lydia Muthuma, published by Focus Publications in 2013, illustrate that poor architectural taste is a contemporary Kenyan affliction – we were designing much better up to around 1981 when the elegant Co-operative House in Nairobi was completed. There have been a few exceptions since – the Coca-Cola Building (2008) and Geminia Insurance Plaza (2008) in Upper Hill are notable departures from this downward spiral but one just has to be confronted by Nation Centre (1991) and the I&M Bank Tower (2001) in the city centre to be reminded of this persistent condition. As such, when you come face to face with Tafaria Castle, the instinct is to see it in light of this trend.

A metaphor is when you appropriate a discourse and apply it in a new or unfamiliar context, for example, using road traffic symbols to illustrate the route to good health; here, the road signs become metaphors for wellbeing. Such rhetorical devices are used to present something in a new and refreshing way with the objective of creating impact and ultimately to persuade. This is the lens through which an appreciation of Tafaria Castle is made possible.

Castles are a European invention, dating back to the 10^th century and originally built as fortified defences. They were usually erected after an area had been conquered and due to this military origin, their prevalence is a historical marker of warfare. Waititu’s dream is to transform the “harsh” environment he grew up in. His means is not war but rather, social, economic and environmental investments with the aim of improving human and physical conditions. Tafaria Castle is the symbol of this intention – the mark of social, economic and environmental conquest; when viewed in this manner, it no longer appears out of place.

Making sense of Telkom Kenya’s market failures

A lot has been written about the troubles at Telkom Kenya, majority owned by Orange Group of France, but not from a customer experience point of view. Late last year, we moved our home and office from Nairobi to Laikipia County, North-West of Mount Kenya, and set up our information design and market research office in Nanyuki. I wanted dedicated office telephone lines so looked up the Orange / Telkom Kenya website mid-year, several months before the move; on the website, there were clearly defined service and product offerings and a simple web form to lodge my request which I completed and submitted.

The derelict Orange / Telkom Kenya building in Nanyuki, Laikipia County (photo by author)

I received an email response after a week. Unintentionally, the person who responded included a long email thread originating from the initial request. Apparently, my original enquiry, which plainly stated what I wanted – a post-paid wireless telephone line for an office in Nanyuki – had instigated an internal skirmish that revolved around which business region Nanyuki was in and who, therefore, should handle this business opportunity.

The internal email exchanges were hilarious to read but betrayed the lack of clarity, market knowledge and decisiveness at Telkom Kenya. The tussle started, encouragingly, with a volunteer: “Let me follow up from Nakuru.” This was promptly smothered by someone else who considered this an encroachment: “Laikipia falls under my region” followed by the apparent referee in this matter: “unless I am mad or confused, Nanyuki is under who exactly?” followed by a tail-between-the-legs moment from the volunteer: “I guess Laikipia is quite large…” and finally “Laikipia is my area!” from the one who had finally been tasked with following up my enquiry.

This internal tiff having been settled thus, the beneficiary emailed me a quotation on a plain Microsoft Word document which stated how much the sim-cards and telephone sets would cost and how much the post-paid deposit would be. I called to ask if this was an official quote from Telkom Kenya since there was no branding, address or named source on the document. I was told to pop into the Nanyuki office if I wanted an official quote. The telephone sets, however, were not available so no progress could be made.

I re-visited the Orange / Telkom Kenya website again in May 2014 and resubmitted my request. In the meantime, I had migrated my Safaricom post-paid modem data line to voice and inserted the sim-card into an old mobile handset which now served as the office telephone as I awaited Telkom Kenya to come through. The response this time was without incident and I was assured that someone would get back to me soon. The next day, another person called and began the conversation by asking what I wanted to which I responded in complete exasperation: don’t you people speak to each other? Don’t you read the enquiries before making the calls? What exactly do you want to know beyond what I have submitted for you to establish what I need?

Despite the Orange / Telkom Kenya web form being immensely simple to complete and covering the basic information to complete a sale, they have not closed this one, one year after the initial enquiry. My experience tells me I am not alone. At Telkom Kenya, making a wireless sim-card sale and supplying a desktop telephone set is considered a rather complex manoeuvre, demanding exhaustive internal deliberation and repeated customer inquisition. Any wonder customer numbers are dwindling and usage of their telephone services is shrinking? Since they still have people calling and running around but are not completing sales, any wonder they are not profitable?

Despite the pervasive mobile phone, desktop phones still have a place in business and Telkom Kenya has a reliable wireless technology. What is lacking is the kamikaze-like zeal of the street vendors who sell car and home accessories, DVDs and other knick-knacks on many African streets. Perhaps the knowledge that, with no sales, there will be no money for food, rent, school fees and other important needs drives these sellers. At Telkom Kenya, there appears to be no connection between effort and reward, the legacy of being a former state-owned entity. The evidence that this culture pervades in Telkom Kenya years after the buy-out by Orange demonstrates the latter's failure to convert its employee’s attitude from a desk-bound, civil service mentality to a street-smart, commercial-savvy mind-set.