kenya

By Patrick Donohue, August 2005

"In Nairobi, stay away from the shanty towns, especially at night."

The door closes, Kibera opens, and East Africa's largest shantytown swallows us into the night. It's dark near Edwin's place, a sight sapping blackness that is darker with the knowledge of the trenches and trips that lie ahead, a misstep can send you rolling down make shift steps to soak in the flowing runoff, Kibera's sewage system. Edwin can see well enough in the dark and navigates the pitfalls without hesitation; I make a joke about mzungu eyes and then switch on my torch. I notice as we walk that the only other people using torches are the mzee, the old men or women. We walk through small alleys and walkways, passing row after row of mud houses with radios blaring, stray light seeping through cracks around the doors and below the roofs. I can't shake the feeling that I'm walking across somebody's front porch but I soon realize that's exactly what we're doing.

Another story about one of the BoP Protocol Pilot's most important partners: Carolina for Kibera (CFK) last week was honored as one of Time Magazine's "Heroes of Global Health" and Acting President Kim Chapman was featured at the Global Health Conference in New York.

CFK is an incredible community-based organization in Kibera: one of the world's largest slums on the outskirts of Nairobi Kenya. The organization's programs target issues of ethnic violence, health care, safe spaces for girls, and environmental sanitation and income generation. All their work follows a common theme of participatory development and the organization's operations in Kenya are run by Kiberans.

There's nothing like a room full of blank stares to tell you that you have just used the wrong word, nobody there knows what you're talking about and you need to adapt, but what do you do when that word is at the heart of what you do? When that glazed-eye-inducing offender is printed all over your business cards?

Erik, Kabi, Edwin and I are in a meeting hall in Kibera, a shanty town in Nairobi, Kenya which, with an estimated one million people, is one of Africa's, if not the world's, largest slums. We're running the second of four community engagement workshops in which we are preparing local community groups, entrepreneurs and social enterprises, on how to best approach and prepare for a partnership with multinational companies; in this case, how to partner with our main corporate sponsor, SC Johnson. This is what we do, we bring people from diverse backgrounds and with diverse resources together, "a creative collision of world views", to create new market opportunities for multinationals and locally grown businesses for poor communities via a process of "mutual value creation". Buzz phrase laden work, yes, but it's actually all been going quite well so far, except that now our community partners are stuck on our name. Behind us, on a brown flip chart taped to the wall, is drawn a large three sided figure, a triangle really, with the words "Base of the Pyramid" written on top, or BoP for short. That's us.

There's a texture to life that we miss in our discussions of poverty, our arm chair strategies in the U.S. on microfinance, disruptive innovation, and entrepreneurship. The BoP Protocol Pilot team has been been in Kenya for almost a month now, visiting a number of homes and organizations throughout western Kenya, from rural farms to urban slums.

And so it begins…

In just two days ways we arrive in Kenya, to begin the pilot test of the Base of the Pyramid (BoP) Protocol.

So you may be wondering, with Sheri Willoughby busy consulting on another BoP project for Johnson and Johnson, and Patrick and the BoP Protocol team in Africa, will the the Workshop get pretty empty?

Actually, it may get more crowded than ever in here! I can't tell you how eager we are to invite some smiling new faces in here. Toys to discover, games to learn, stories to share, dreams to awake. Stay tuned for regular updates from the field.

And please, wish us luck and learning.

Create often, play always.

-your friends at BRINQ.