Doing us a favor.

Thank you to all my faithful readers... those faithful enough to stop back in after more than a month without the addition of fresh content. I left you all wading in my musings of bike design and application. Seeing as the past month has carried me down from the lofty sanctuary of planning to the dusty streets of implementation, I owe everyone an update on the ever-humbling experience of converting development theory into practice.

Somewhere back in the sands of time I mentioned our community partner in the Kibera slum, Soweto Youth Group (SYG). Since early July myself and our hired community mobilization specialist, Patrick Analo (left), have been engaging with this group. SYG was founded in 1999 as a gathering of youth engaging in recreational sports and was officially registered as a community-based organization (CBO) in 2003. In 2004 they attracted their first NGO attention and have since become a hub for non-profit activities and a key representative of the Soweto East community (shown as the highlighted corner of Kibera in on the map). As a result of previous partnerships with non-profits, SYG is currently engaged in a small door-to-door trash collection business. The goal of this project (the half that's located in Kibera) is to expand this enterprise both for the provision of sanitation services to the community as well as to provide income generation for SYG and its members. As Worldbike, naturally part of this expansion is supposed to involve the deployment of non-motorized transportation.

Currently the SYG enterprise has about 250 customers each of whom pay 20 Kenyan shillings (0.30 USD) per collection. The waste is collected from buckets that the group has distributed to customers and is carried by hand to a sorting site where it is sorted into organics, recyclables, and trash. Because the business is fairly new and the amount of trash produced per customer is so low, none of the collected material has yet been transferred out of the hands of SYG. The organics (the majority of the material) are transferred to the group's composting site from which the intended, though not secured, destination is farmers.

While household collection will continue to grow, the majority of the intended business expansion is to be comprised of trash collection from community dumping sites. UN-Habitat has built eight public toilets in Soweto East each of which is soon to also act as a dumping point for household waste. SYG will be in the business of collecting and sorting this material and ultimately disposing of it to the proper handlers. Additionally we are exploring the possibilities of collection within the communities surrounding Soweto East. The intention is that non-motorized vehicles are to play a key role in transportation of all this material. Here's a thematically related link to a business in the U.S. (http://www.faircompanies.com/main.aspx?uc=multidet&tipus=flv&id=230). That's the light at the end of the tunnel and I will talk more about the business plan in a future post.

On the ground, the first step has been to develop entrepreneurship and a non-motorized transport committees within SYG and to begin trainings in business operation and bicycle mechanics/design. While the trainings were to be largely focused on development of these two committees, they were made open to other members of the youth group. Naturally, the intention was to be inclusive, to build broader group capacity, and to give individuals skill sets that they could use in their personal lives. It seemed so simple...

Here are the two problems. First, members of SYG are extremely busy. Most are in their twenties, many are married, many have children, many have jobs, and most are poor. Therefore almost everyone has daily responsibilities and for some those include daily sustenance. Second, members of SYG (and any community that has familiarity with NGOs) are acutely attuned to the possibility of free handouts. The unspoken code is that any time members of a community organization gather within the boundaries of an NGO project they are to be paid for their time. That includes being paid to attend entrepreneurship trainings (for which most people would spend hundreds of dollars of their own money). The attitude that recipients are doing a favor to their providers simply by taking what is offered can feel like a real slap in the face. “It's like giving someone food and then paying them to eat it,” the feeling was recently summarized to Patrick and I.

Additionally, those payments can function to create motivations that ultimately undermine projects. While an NGO might have visions of jump starting a sustainable community improvement project, those collectivist sentiments might be supplanted in the minds of participants by visions of pay checks and nothing more. The result is often a project that collapses as soon as the NGO departs and the cash cow runs dry. The difficulty in Kibera is in separating the true need for financial assistance from the dishonest ploys for handouts. In the end we've decided not to pay for attendance under the premise that personal sacrifice begets true commitment. And that without commitment no one will care whether the ship we call the project sinks or floats. This has created major waves in the group's natural rhythm. Attendance in both courses has dropped from 18 down to six over the period of three classes and even those six have not regularly attended the preceding two classes. And while the training impact has been decreasing, the energy spent trying to sooth hostilities over the lack of payment have increased to the point of rendering project progress almost impossible.

Yesterday, however, hopefully represented the turning point as we begin to direct energies away from the inclusiveness of the trainings and refocus on the project objectives of planning and growing the trash collection enterprise. The trainings, it was decided, should revert back to what they were always meant to be: opportunities for those who were willing to put in the time now for their personal growth and prosperity in the long-term. It's only a shame that so few have taken up the opportunity after we worked so hard to structure the course topics around espoused interests, timed the classes to only consume 2.5 hours on a Saturday morning, and promised to act as personal mentors and networkers to anyone sojourning into individual enterprise. In the end, Patrick can only give so many inspirational speeches and I listen to the case for “motivating” class participants before it becomes incumbent upon the individuals to act by their own volition.

Today Patrick and I will tour the public toilet facilities with our partners from the UN, the engineer from another NGO, and members from SYG to discuss the construction of access roads that are passable by cargo bikes (either three-wheelers or trailers). Right now many of the collection sites are accessible only by the narrow twisting pathways/drainages that are the Kibera thoroughfares. As much as Worldbike loves to design bikes, a project like this boldly highlights the fact that design always takes the back seat to the challenges of application.