Our activities are organized to complement two ongoing UN programs, one in the Kibera slums of Nairobi (second largest slum in Africa) and one in the Mirera-Karagita slum of Naivasha.
See the lake to the northwest of Nairobi. That's Lake Naivasha, about an hour and half away on decent roads climbing and then descending into the rift valley (i.e. it's a lot warmer their than in Nairobi at 5000ft). That's where the town is. A huge quanity of fresh flowers bound for Europe come out of Naivasha. The strain on the water resources is considerable enough to put lake put the lakes existence in jeopardy. Mt. Kenya at 17,000fr is just north of Embu. For a complete map, go to: http://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/africa/kenya_pol88.jpg
In Kibera we will be a micro-component to the massive, long-term, and controversial Kenya Slum Upgrading Programme and in Mirera-Karagita we will complement a smaller and newer program focused on improving the delivery of water, sanitation, hygiene, and environmental management services.
Our project will begin in Kibera before moving on to Mirera-Karagita several months from now. In Kibera, Worldbike's input is intended to be a seed given life through a partnership with Soweto Youth Group. This well-respected organization with individuals probably ranging from 15-28 years old will be the entrepreneurial body that generates the designs and business models that Worldbike will advise and launch using the UN-Habitat funding. Excitingly, our work is actually piggybacking on work done by Practical Action and UN-Habitat a couple years ago. From my understanding, Practical Action produced a number of successful non-motorized transport vehicles in Kayole and with a sliver of leftover funding were able to conduct a pilot project with Soweto Youth Group to build single iterations of a mobile food kiosk, a trailer for hauling solid waste, and a trailer for ambulance services. The brief effort was apparently intended to test interest in these non-motorized technologies. That interest was reportedly significant and is one reason that UN-Habitat has brought on Worldbike to follow up. I will talk more about the efforts in Mirera-Karagita when that time approaches.
More interesting than the organizational details is the way we understand our relationship to the populations of people who have invited us to work with them. The following is my conceptualization of the major problem faced by the world poor followed by how I think Worldbike offers an effective solution.
The lives of most Kenyans (and most people in the world) is marked by instability in one or more of the basic elements re quired for economic ascendancy in a capitalist, technological world. This includes instability in income/employment, health, access to education, available savings, family size, access to communication technologies, access to information, quality of shelter, etc. Imagine for a moment that you are a slum dweller vending roasted peanuts by the roadside. You manage to pay school fees for one of your children and have the wherewithal to save a couple cents (Kenyan shillings) a day with the hope of buying an ice cream cart with which you can ply the main roads selling to wealthy motorists. The ambition is a good one and is the upward mobility trajectory that we love to imagine for the poor. Unfortunately on the way to those greener pastures are dozens of rickety bridges each with a menacing troll underneath. These represent instability and its consequences. The first bridge is family size: a sister dies from HIV and you must now take in her four kids. The next is market variability: the price of peanuts goes up and you no longer have a savings margin. The third is security: your cell phone gets stolen and you lose touch with your future business partner. The fourth, investment risk: you start paying installments on the cart but can't finish and it's repossessed. And so on... The danger of instability is that the dream you have today, even if it's simple, has a high chance of getting gobbled up on its way to fulfillment. The consequence may be the loss of your investment or, perhaps worse, your willingness to try again.
Living and studying in Kenya two years ago I found this story of failure over and over again. Often people's investments were failing because they didn't have a financial buffer to push through unexpected setbacks. A family I lived with then has three such stories. First, the father lost his job at a bank as part of a World Bank structural adjustment “retrenchment” prescription (layoff employees to reduce the cost of public services) forcing the family to abandon half-completed work on an addition to their house. Second, the family built a pen and feeding area to produce income by raising cattle but it was left empty because they couldn't afford cows when school fees became a burden and higher priority. Finally, the father joined a community savings group but lost his investment when one of the members split town with all the money. By many respects this family was well off; they had no major health problems, the parents were alive, together, and both employed, some of their children had gone to higher education, they ate three meals a day, had a sturdy home, and kept a budget. A person living in a slum might have none of these things.
Again, the problem with instability is that it preempts the “American dream” romance of hard work leading to upward mobility that can be so tempting to prescribe to the world's poor. Plenty of poor people work hard but their ambitions and their capabilities are often not matched by necessary resources. So what's a solution? Micro-credit is having a fantastic impact on this problem by fast-tracking the route to enterprise creation and reducing the time spent on those rickety bridges. Worldbike works in a similar capacity and in collaboration with micro-credit to move people quickly and with low risk to the status of enterprise owners. Our additional caveat is that we work with bicycles and pursue businesses that are initially less proven and require more experimentation, more risk, and more debt than an individual might rightfully be willing to take on. In the end, we hope that our enterprises also pays higher dividends both for the individual and for society.
What we do is absorb the costs inherent in overcoming the technological and cultural hurdles of developing a new transportation sector. We and our funders act as the venture capitalists (that don't expect financial returns) and the technical consultants (that don't expect to be paid) that leave behind small, sustainable, profitable businesses that have no debt. When these businesses and technologies prove themselves, then the sector will be positioned to grow independently using micro-credit resources.
In Kibera we will work to undertake an entrepreneurship training curriculum that is integrated with the actual development of enterprises amongst members of the Soweto Youth Group. In tandem we will 1) collaboratively develop bicycle designs that will serve the group's future enterprises and 2) build bicycle design and maintenance capacity within the group and within the informal industrial sector where the bikes are likely to be manufactured.
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