#SwitchOffKLPC Hashtags and social movements

KOT is characterised by many things. It’s rambunctious, boisterous and decidedly disorderly. It’s sometimes funny and whimsical.  It’s also on occasion misogynistic and homophobic. And every so often, we have woke KOT.  And while “twitter activism” has been dismissed in many places (think Peter Kenneth’s presidential  “twitter votes”), its mobilising and rallying power has definitely changed how online Kenyans think and interact with the state and authority. Twitter’s ability to democratise information has forged commonalities in Kenyans where through the hyper-connectedness of Twitter, common outrage against inflated power bills has led to Kenyans mobilising around the #SwitchOffKPLC hashtag.

Hashtag  activism isn’t new in Kenya. There have been some successful hashtags e.g. the #MyDressMyChoice which was able to halt the noxious trend by  PSV operators of assaulting women for “dressing indecently” and also translated to offline prosecutions and convictions. Some of these hashtags were short lived and ephemeral e.g.  #SomeoneTellCNN, the #UhuruChallenge or even the #DeportKoffiOlomide that faded off KOT radar after objectives were met (and perhaps also due to an admittedly short KOT attention span!). Some e.g. #WhatIsARoad #OverlapKE have morphed into longer lasting hashtags that are still being used to call attention to two of the biggest aggravations facing Kenyan commuters- the deplorable state of our roads, and overlapping menaces who make commuting a daily nightmare.

Kenya Power and power

By all accounts, KPLC is the piggy-bank of choice for government regimes, officials and connected Kenyans. It’s a feeding trough that is fed by hard earned Kenyan cash- much of this non disposable income for Kenyans that are barely making it.

The #SwitchOffKPLC campaign has also given Kenyans a small peek behind the curtains at the corruption machine that runs and controls most of industry and politics in Kenya. “KOT police” have been instrumental in providing information that answer Eric Wainaina’s question of who is to blame for the rot in our country. What’s clearly obvious through some of the information that is coming through is that this corruption machine neither sleeps nor slumbers. Like a perverse virtue, this looting machine is patient, and unkind. It always protects the benefactors, and unless something changes, will probably always persevere. It’s also proven to be very innovative - see e.g. the third party token vendors who saw an opportunity to make money through alternative paybills and were able to capture 35% of the token market.

What we should however never lose sight of is that these staggering fortunes made through bribery of KPLC officials, creation of fake fuel shortages, and  siphoning of money are crimes that have very real victims behind them. If you trawl the lead campaigners/ founders of the movement @apollomboya  @jerotichSeei and supporters’ twitter timelines, tweets tell stories of predation by an uncaring, indifferent corporation that has used its position as a monopoly to brutalise and bilk Kenyans of their hard earned and scarce coins regardless of the human cost. They have shown zero compunction in over billing widows and grannies, and businesses on the edge. 

Social Movements & Social Media

For Kenyan civil society- especially those working in transparency/ accountability and energy sector, the campaign offers an opportunity to make change in the notoriously corrupt energy sector. And while I don’t think that online campaigning will (or even should) replace traditional civil society, supporting the #SwitchOffKPLC campaign would bolster the efforts of the movement and their own work in energy justice. There are perhaps lessons to be learned from how the #BLM movement has been able to grow from a twitter hashtag to one that has galvanised (and some say rescued) the civil rights movement in the US. From all accounts, it was able to morph into a social movement because of its ability to tap into grassroots organisations, NGOs and other associational life to leverage its online popularity into offline work in the judiciary, churches, schools etc. Mr Mboya’s public interest litigation, online research and activism by Ms Seii   and others has translated to offline gains where consumers have earned a reprieve from inflated bills through the court system.  For civil society activists, the campaign could serve to connect energy justice, anti corruption and transparency and accountability work. 

It’s proving that it can help counter sponsored disinformation and provide alternative narratives that amplify universally recognisable truths- that the kleptocracy that rules Kenya is literally and metaphorically killing us. It also offers an already beleaguered civil society a chance to re-moblise its base, and work to chip away at the age old corruption looting machine we’ve been fighting for a long time. 

xxx

Atieno Yo!

The Good Life

The pages of Drum or True Love offer a peek into the dreams and aspirations of the Kenyan woman. With stunning shots of exquisitely furnished homes, interspersed with mouth-watering food, and articles on how to attain a beautiful (read, fit) body at home with equipment easily bought at Nakumatt, the magazines both create and curate Kenyan aspirations and hip Kenyan aesthetic. 

This lifestyle with its parquet wood floors, beautifully wrought burglar proofing, high thread-count cotton sheets, and faux-aged sculptures from Maasai markets by necessity require high maintenance. Someone needs to dust and polish the wooden floors, dust the ornaments- something that is inimical to also working out, maintaining that high-octane career, entertaining friends with tastefully prepared in-season & sustainably produced food. A calculation of the person hours required to maintain this lifestyles underscores a central truth: Kenyan domestic prosperity is contingent on the use of lower-income persons’ labour. This is a life that requires a steady supply of cheap and low maintenance labour. The domestic worker is a necessary input into what’s needed to maintain and preserve the employer’s valuables including children, expensive furniture, and ultimately peace of mind from the time consuming work of running a household.

Feminisation of Domestic Labour  

Women make up the vast majority of domestic workers. The female domestic is called on to perform and enact the ‘feminine’ role in the household due to the feminisation of reproductive labour in this sector. This life, a part relic of colonial master-servant relations perpetuates notions of what it means to be a successful employer couple. The idleness of a colonial wife was the mark of a successful colonial husband. He was expected to produce enough money to allow the employment of a coterie of servants. The wife would ensure that the household ran smoothly- without the back-breaking labour required for this of course. In contemporary Kenya, the nanny-cleaning lady-gardener-guard are also deemed as requirements to ensure that the two-income family is possible, without sacrificing the comforts owed the successful man (cooked & hot food, clean house, changed diapers etc).

Consumption/ Work Dualism

The dualism inherent in paid domestic labour is seen in the conception of the house/ home as both public/ private places and spaces for either production/ consumption. For the employer, the home is a sanctuary from the job and state. It’s a space where the employer consumes the fruit of their labour- the flat screen TV, a good book and clean children. It’s the rewarding space where one can purchase both the time and activities for relaxation. For the domestic worker, this is a productive space where labour is traded for a pay check. It’s also a place where the domestic worker also trades in their identity as part of the procurement of their labour. It’s often expected, especially for the live-in domestic worker, that she shall trade in her identity as an adult wage earning Kenyan to a kinda-sorta family member (albeit one who is never present in family photos or events). She’s expected to be asexual (no visits from husbands/ lovers) and her dietary preferences are subsumed by the employers’. While expected to cherish the employer’s children as her own, she is however expected to eschew her familial ties - e.g. the domestic workers’ children are only noticed when they are the underlying cause of a labour interruption “Her child got malaria so now I don’t have a nanny”.  

Workplace Violence:

In Kenya, and elsewhere, this sector is characterised by being very competitive, little regulated and attempts to unionise workers have had little to no traction. Domestic work is characterised by low pay, long hours, job insecurity and high vulnerability which translates to high incidents of workplace violence. The issue of sexual violence against domestic workers presents one of the more egregious cases of victim blaming- even in a country where victim blaming is rife. At bridal showers, wisdom on how to manage house and husband is dispensed with the proper and wifely management of the domestic worker taking centre stage in this curriculum. The bride to be is usually given life hacks on how to ensure that the domestic worker ‘stays in her lane’. “These women will eat you out of house and home if you’re not careful” the bride to be is told (“Lock the store and only remove the tea bags/ sugar you need for a few days”). These Jezebels are also out to entrap your husband and future sons. Care must be taken it’s emphasised, to ensure that she doesn’t sway those hips as bent over, she washes the floor (General advice: “Buy a mop”). If you ever unexpectedly walk into a furtive and quickly interrupted embrace between spouse and domestic worker in the kitchen, fire her immediately.

While there have been gains in labour law favouring domestic workers, power relations are still skewed very much in favour of the employer. While the statistics on this are notoriously hard to come by, anecdotally one assumes it’s prevalent in the sector. It’s quite usual to hear that many men’s first sexual experience was with a domestic worker. It would be highly unusual that these sexual interactions were always consensual from the perspective of the domestic worker.  Domestic workers however have little room for redress or relief, and a study by Oxfam on the working conditions of women drawn from the Mukuru informal settlement seems to validate this. The study showed that attempts by domestic workers to get redress faced obstacles where employers corrupted officials (e.g. chiefs & police) and/or the workers were asked for payment by the police to initiate an investigation.  

While the courts have started logging some impressive victories for domestic workers, a central truth (paraphrasing Audre Lorde) is that the personal and the political should illuminate all our lives. Just societies invariably emanate from just workplaces and just homes. A fair & prosperous Kenya, where citizens aren’t deprived of the rights due them, is dependent on the majority of Kenyans abiding by the spirit and letter of the law. In this case, this entails paying their domestic workers minimum wage, NHIF & NSSF, a valid contract, sick leave and time off. Anything less is not only illegal, but also guarantees the continued existence of slums and unjust society.

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Data as political: Offline to Online exclusions

Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral...technology’s interaction with the social ecology is such that technical developments frequently have environmental, social, and human consequences that go far beyond the immediate purposes of the technical devices and practices themselves. ~ Melvin Kranzberg

Following the discussions around open data, the issue of what data inclusions constitute privacy violations, especially when it comes to big data, is perhaps the biggest concern to open data advocates. To quote Kieron O’Hara, what we seek is “transparent Government and not transparent citizens”.  While the issue of data that should not be included has been getting a lot of attention, the issue of data exclusions that should be included has however been getting less attention. 

At the recently concluded Hivos’ Service Delivery Indicators Project Data for Education and Health meetings, attendees were quite vocal about the political nature of data, and warned that to treat it as a neutral thing, is to implicitly support the biases built into the data.  Where the data is being used for policy making, especially resource allocation (!), then it becomes even more important to pay attention to the motives, blind spots, capacities and indeed, values of the persons designing the data collection exercise, and the collecting and analyzing of this data. It’s not a stretch to say that marginalization and exclusions offline tend to be mirrored during the data collection process as can be seen in e.g. Kenya where data from North Eastern Kenya is often left out, with  “inaccessibility, security, expense, capacity” often given as the reasons for the non-collection of this data. As a result, where the counties wish to use data for policy, they find themselves having to use proxy data, or else carry out primary research with their limited resources to correct this gap. 

These data gaps matter.  When opening up the Kenya Open Data portal, President Mwai Kibaki said “The Government data website will be particularly useful to policy makers and business persons who require timely and accurate information in formulating policies and making business decisions.” Where there is no data, then policy is deduced from ‘experience’ and extrapolation, which does a disservice to these areas as all too often this information, is neither timely nor accurate. It’s become common, with perhaps the exception of the Central Government, to have data blank spots over some counties, especially those from North Eastern Kenya. 

In addition to data collected by state and non state actors, this also extends to crowd sourcing platforms developed to collect information from citizens via citizen reports. A cursory look at the platforms deployed for election, water, infrastructure monitoring etc. have most of the reports from citizens clustered around the major cities and towns, and as an interesting peculiarity of Kenyan data, areas that are not arid or semi-arid. It’s interesting how one can almost get a perfect match between rainfall patterns and socio-economic wellbeing in Kenya with the arid and semi arid lands tending to do more poorly than their greener counterparts. 

Other pertinent exclusions include data on Persons with Disabilities, with the attendant policy implications. Where data is not collected on say, accessible health and education infrastructure, then this could negatively impact educational and health outcomes of PWDs. To illustrate, if the data suggests that there are 20 facilities available to citizens in a certain county, if  all 20 facilities  are inaccessible to PWDs, then this number should read “0”. Where this data is not available, then the assumption is that the PWDs in the county are being served, while in truth they aren’t and this invisibility of the persons is reflected in subsequent policy actions and resources allocation. 

It is perhaps not overstating to suggest that these exclusions are seen where real world exclusions apply e.g. People living in informal urban settlements tend to be missing from the urban planning process, except as a problem that needs to be resolved. This was flagged by the mappers of Map Kibera who wanted to give visibility (existence?) to the people who live, work, worship etc. in Kibera, and was never visible in any Government maps. Kibera was a blank spot on the Nairobi map until young Kiberans created the first free and open digital map of their own community.

For policy makers, open data proponents and civil society, the implications for this are obvious. We need, when carrying out projects to examine what real world exclusions exist, map these, and see if they’re mirrored in the data that we’d like to use for policy. Only then can we say we’ve made a good faith effort in promoting ethical and equitable data use for policy.

Open Health datasets on the web for Kenya

One of the most frustrating things when working with data sets in health and education, or perhaps all, data sets is finding the right data set in the format and year(!) that you need it in.

Here's an exhaustive list of the open data sets that we were able to find of the open data sets for health in Kenya that fit the definition of open data i.e.

Open data is data that can be freely used, reused and redistributed by anyone - subject only, at most, to the requirement to attribute and sharealike.

Ministry of Health, Government of Kenya

List of health facilities in Kenya
Health Sector Services Fund disbursements.

Kenya Open Data Initiative
From:  Various Ministries in the Government of Kenya.
Various assorted health databases
Also contains some external databases contributed by non-governmental sources


Medical Board, Kenya
From: Kenyan Medical Practitioners and Dentists Board
Retention Register : List of licensed health practitioners and health facilities




(While other databases exist, these require passwords and typically are for credentialed members  e.g. www.hiskenya.org so these were not included).

Thanks to Madi-Jimba Yahya @madijimba and Crystal Simeoni @crystalsimeoni

Annus horribilis for Kenyan School Children?

I wonder at the reasoning behind the decision by the Ministry of Education to schedule an annual event for headteachers to coincide with the opening of schools.

Not impressed

This is in a context where children in public schools routinely lose about 53% of their learning time from teacher absenteeism, both sanctioned and unsanctioned. In addition, to these 'normal' time leakages, school children in our public schools lost at least 24 teaching days this year from the teachers strike that had stopped all learning earlier this year.

This infographic on teacher absenteeism puts the situation in perspective. Makes me want to ask:
"Ministry of Education, what were you thinking?"

Quick hits: Social Innovation Tracker

Takachar
Unmanaged waste and severe fuel shortage are two significant issues facing Nairobi dwellers.  Takacharhas a business-in-a-box model that allows the waste-pickers to own and operate low-cost technologies to turn unused organic waste into charcoal. They do this by firstly carrying out waste collection by mobilizing the entire slum to turn in their waste (and not just the few who can afford the service). Second, they turn organic waste into a safe and affordable cooking fuel for local households. They hope that this will lead to less charcoal production from wood and save trees, while serving wide-ranging social issues such as increasing local income, reducing greenhouse emissions. 

Ping (Positive Innovation for the Next Generation)

Using smartphones to respond to, track and prevent malaria epidemics.

Healthcare workers in Botswana, equipped with smartphones can now gather malaria information via an app and upload the data (along with pictures, video, and audio) to the cloud. This enables Health Ministry officials in Botswana to:

• Promptly collect and analyze context-aware data on malarial outbreaks
•  Track developments in real time and using GPS coordinates
•  Rapidly help to suppress the spread of malaria
•  Quickly dispatch medicines and mosquito nets
•  Monitor treatments and accumulate lifesaving research data.

Good Intentions…

The story of Kibera’s “wheelbarrow ambulances”, where wheelbarrows retrofitted with a siren are used to ferry people to hospital was broadcast by Citizen TV at the beginning of the year.
First, to be very clear, this is an innovation born of necessity. Queen Wambua, the Traditional Birth Attendant who thought up the idea explains in the clip above, that she needed a way to ferry women who were bleeding-out during childbirth to Mbagathi Hospital. This is an invention that arose out of our informal settlements where a deplorable lack of basic infrastructure, state neglect and a sheer disregard for citizens created conditions extremely hostile to basic rights to health and other social services.  To reiterate, they needed wheelbarrow ambulances because people were dying in Kibera before they could get to hospital. Amref, the organization supporting the initiative, decided to do so because the only viable way of getting people out of Kibera’s non-roads and narrow alleyways was a wheelbarrow. These facts are undisputable.

This story however left me extremely ambivalent. I recognize the pragmatism and the life saving possibilities of the wheelbarrow ambulance. But! When we benchmark this innovation against prevailing acceptable minimum standards for healthcare including privacy, dignity and safety, it is unlikely that these are being met by the wheelbarrow ambulance. Looked at through this normative lens (“Is it right? Is it acceptable”) this invention misses the mark by a mile.

These are not pot-shots at people who are trying to make a difference. Not at all. I’m also not saying that the wheelbarrow ambulances should not exist, because the alternative, as Queen Wambua said, is probable death for some of the residents. This is a different argument. My ambivalence comes in when I wonder if by accepting this level of service; we set a standard for what ‘acceptable’ healthcare service in informal settlements is. By failing to insist that we tackle the systemic pathologies e.g. lack of security, infrastructure and health services, we deal with the symptomatic, and leave the underlying causes festering. That people can pinpoint with GPS-like accuracy where the security black-spots are but this knowledge, this certainty does not translate to the deployment of extra police to those black-spots is symptomatic of a moribund security system.  That there are 200,000 people who have no access to adequate health care system in the capital city, tells a tale of what the health system actually looks like on a national level. These injustices are unaddressed, and they need to be looked at soberly and with the seriousness that the residents of Kibera deserve. For me who works in development, it also raises questions about what exactly the over 1,000 NGOs in Kibera, many of them working on health actually do. (NGO registry and rating board coming right up!)

There are obviously many basics e.g. roads, security, and healthcare that obviously need to be put in place. And for this, every past state official charged with the oversight of any part of Kibera has utterly and completely failed to do his or her job.

The situation also calls for new solutions that would help solve, or at the very least ameliorate the situation of Kibera residents. There needs to be ways in which we are thinking of improved ways in which we can deliver basic healthcare in extremely resource constrained environments. There are groups that have been innovating, and getting traction on ways in which to provide cheap healthcare to ‘BOP’ e.g LifeSpring maternity hospitals in India where the average costs of labor/ delivery is about $70.

We need to be thinking of innovations that can change how we deliver accessible and affordable healthcare in Kenya, as the current system for public health is not working. We should develop ways in which we can get more people into affordable health care schemes because right now, the costs of medical care are the number one impoverishing factor for families.

This service innovation needs to happen as a matter of urgency.  And in the meantime, the wheelbarrow ambulance will continue saving lives.