“Believe in yourself before others understand you.” (Believe in yourself before others understand you.)On August 14, 2019, Amani Katana, founder of Mombasa Youth Empowerment Initiative (YEPI) Kenya shared his life story and YEPI with a group of Titanium Project teenagers from China at the Muslim Community Library in the old town of Mombasa. The origin of the story deeply touched the hearts of everyone present.
Amani Katana
“The bravest decision I ever made was to return to the community.”
Before Amani founded YEPI, he worked as the operations director of a shipping company at the Port of Mombasa for eight years. This was a respectable and well-paying job locally, and it was also a job that corresponded to the major he studied at university. His peers around him are not so lucky - in Kenya, where education rates are low and unemployment is high, most children are unable to complete their studies, and even those lucky enough to graduate from college struggle to find a decent job.
The unemployment rate in the coastal area is as high as 51%, more than twice the national unemployment rate of 21%, and more than 90% of the ethnic groups are young people aged 16 to 35. Therefore, friends often come to ask him to help introduce jobs. He is very sad and deeply feels that his personal power is very limited. After some careful consideration, he made what he considered "the bravest decision in his life" - to give up his job and explore new and more effective ways to deal with this severe social challenge.
People around him are extremely incomprehensible to his almost crazy behavior, but he always responds to the questioning voices around him: "I come from this community, so I have to give back to this community. I always ask myself what I want, and I also Always know the answer to that question."
After Amani quit her job in 2011, she began to follow her passion for social entrepreneurship. He first did some exploration of clean energy to study whether it could provide women with clean coal for cooking, replacing the traditional local method of logging and deforestation to obtain fuel, and also reducing the harm to the human body caused by toxic gases produced by burning wood.
After that, he started recycling garbage again, and founded a company called Garb Tech in 2015 to use technology to process and recycle solid waste and plastic waste. It is estimated that Mombasa generates about 2,000 tons of solid waste every day, of which an estimated 68% is recycled by the government; while the remaining 32% is incinerated and disposed of in streets, rivers or public lands, thereby polluting the environment and exposing residents to disease. Garb Tech is committed to solving this problem through efficient, reliable and affordable waste management services.
In the process of continuous project implementation, Amani has accumulated a lot of entrepreneurial experience. He began to think about how to help young people in Mombasa improve their employability. In 2014, he joined the Youth African Leadership Initiative (YALI) launched by former US President Obama and met two like-minded young people who were committed to youth empowerment - Biabu Shaffi and Levina Ocholla. They hit it off and established YEPI.
Charle
Within the next year, Amani found 6 other young people who shared the same vision and enthusiasm on different occasions, and established a core team of 9 people. Everyone in the team is a social entrepreneur or a middle-level or senior executive in the enterprise. managers. The youngest Charles was 24 years old at the time and served as the communications director in the team. He was still studying for a graduate degree in financial management and was already running a small company that trained public speaking; the oldest member was only 35 years old.
Each of them invested in YEPI projects in their free time after work and did not receive any income from YEPI. The same 9 people organized 79 trainings in just 4 years in cooperation with the government, enterprises, and schools, served more than 2,500 local marginalized youth, created more than 200 job opportunities, and began to incubate some A social enterprise with a sense of social responsibility and environmental awareness.
YEPI is committed to helping young people aged 16 to 35 solve the problems of unemployment and poverty.Their early research found that the main reasons for high unemployment in coastal areas were lack of education, government corruption, and backward economic development. During the interview with Charles, we learned that the high unemployment rate in the Kenyan coast will not only affect the economy, but also cause great social instability. Because it is adjacent to Somalia, the Somali Al-Shabaab secretly sneaks into Kenya to recruit troops. Young people without jobs are easily attracted by the superior offers offered by these extremist organizations.
In response to these problems, YEPI launched three major projects. One is the "Youth Seed Program" , which provides business and entrepreneurship training to young people in schools and communities, including how to identify business opportunities and market needs, formulate business plans, find market investment and corporate cooperation, etc. The core is to cultivate young entrepreneurs spirit, take the initiative to create jobs instead of looking for jobs; the second project is the " Future Entrepreneur Training Camp" , which selects 10 young entrepreneurs with the most innovative ideas to solve social problems through a business competition and conducts a week of intensive training , improve their design thinking, leadership, and social skills, and help them link social resources to promote their plans to obtain investment or sponsorship; the third project is "Entrepreneur Ethics Training" , dedicated to anti-corruption and ethics in Kenya The committee works with government officials to cultivate honesty and trustworthiness among young people and to resist corruption.
In addition, YEPI also has a program dedicated to training female entrepreneurs called Academy for Women (AWE), which has provided digital literacy training to more than 100 women.
"Changemakers" like this are springing up in Kenyan communities.
"When we sit together we can see the power of women"
“We didn’t know that we women had rights and could make our own decisions.Now we have the right to decide that our daughters will not be circumcised, and if we have enough income, we can repair our houses, go to the hospital for check-ups, and send our children to school. " Elizabeth, a young mother who participated in the women's mutual aid group, said proudly. Such changes are thanks to Naret Intoyie, the "Maasai Women's Empowerment Organization" that established the mutual aid group.
On a sunny Sunday morning in August, founder Alice took a group of us to the village of Rombo, located on the border of Kenya and Tanzania. It is now the dry season, and the dust storms along the way have almost blocked everyone's sight. Alice smiled and said: "If it were the rainy season, the entire road we are driving on would be flooded by heavy rains, making it impossible to come in. So we are very lucky!”Along the way, outside the window is a typical savanna landscape, with large areas of empty and barren land occasionally sparsely dotted with some drought-resistant corn, potatoes, and local beans. But we will occasionally pass by some green spaces near water sources. Alice told us that these better cultivated lands were bought by the Kikuyu people from the Maasai people and then developed by themselves.Because the Maasai people have always been a semi-nomadic people, they have few farming traditions and no technology in this area. But now with overgrazing and more and more frequent extreme droughts, some Maasai people are also advocating by the government and NGOs. gradually transformed into agriculture. And this process is also quite slow, because the Maasai people are famous for adhering to their traditional culture, especially their cherishing of cattle and sheep . Although drought has been predicted for some years, they are not willing to sell their cattle and sheep and wait until the rainy season to buy new ones, because for them, this is not only a source of income, but also a gift from God, just like Kikuyu People have the same love for the land.
On the way, we also met many adult Maasai men driving cattle and sheep with one or two young boys, most of whom looked like primary school students. Whenever a large herd of cattle or sheep passes by, our car will stop and give way. Such a situation is not uncommon even in Nairobi, the capital of Kenya. Most of the women we saw were carrying dilapidated buckets and walking slowly on the road. Some were mothers with their children, some were with several little girls, and some were dressed more grandly, preparing to go to church. worship.
After more than an hour of bumpy driving, the car finally stopped on an empty red land with only a few acacia trees. After walking some distance, we arrived at the house where Alice was going to have a meeting with the women's group today. In 2015, Alice, who graduated from Eagleton University in Kenya, and several other post-90s women founded this Maasai women's empowerment organization. Alice, 28, is also a survivor of female circumcision. She underwent circumcision at the age of 12 along with five other girls in the village. Fortunately, her parents did not marry her off immediately because of Christianity like most Maasai parents, but supported her. She finished her studies. However, her friends all dropped out of school one after another after circumcision and were arranged by their parents to marry; some of them failed to survive the recovery period after circumcision and died due to wound infection and inflammation.Alice did not want her future children to become one of them, so she chose gender studies and education as her majors. After graduation, she returned to her hometown and began to devote herself to community development and female empowerment. She said , "It wasn't until I went to college that I realized that not everyone needs to go through this. People here have been silent for too long. Now we need to make our voices heard and fight for our rights. " In traditional Maasai families, generally Men are the heads of the family and hold the economic power, while women mostly do various housework and take care of children.
Alice feels that Maasai women must first gain financial independence and have their own disposable income. Therefore, she used the knowledge she learned in college to start trying to establish a women's mutual aid group in her village and explore a microfinance model. Women who are willing to join the group are asked to deposit 250 shillings (approximately US$2.5) per week into a public account opened by them in the town. The group will select special financial personnel, recordkeepers, chairman and other positions. Responsible for supervision and coordination. Alice also comes over every week to hold meetings with the women's group to discuss how to use the funds. Most of the time, they will use the money to buy some raw materials for business, such as Maasai beads for weaving handicrafts, or they will buy some second-hand clothes or cloth from Tanzanians on the border and sell them in the town. The money they earn will Put it back into the treasury and pay dividends once a year. If you need it urgently, you can apply for a loan and repay it within the specified time. If it is overdue, you will need to pay a certain amount of interest. Elizabeth, who just shared her changes with us, is the recorder of the group, and the meeting place today is in front of her newly built house.
Two years ago, when Alice mentioned microfinance to this group of women, every one of them was skeptical. They had never received any education and had no concept of finance. Moreover, in traditional Maasai concepts, money or It is said that currency itself has no meaning, and only cattle and sheep have value. Therefore, staff from the "Maasai Women's Empowerment Organization" come here every week to conduct some business-related training and slowly support women to try some small businesses. At the same time, Alice and her colleagues will also carry out other women's empowerment projects in villages and schools, such as reproductive health education, hygiene education, life skills training, etc., to improve women's comprehensive abilities while improving the life of the entire community. condition.Now, after two years of development, this group has 20 permanent members and has successfully served 1,500 Maasai girls and 250 Maasai women. But Alice told us that a survey in 2017 showed that the female circumcision rate in Rombo is still as high as 90%. Because the area is sparsely populated, everyone lives in remote places, and some places are difficult to reach. She hopes that the successful model explored here can be extended to more regions in the future.
"We can't change the whole world, but we can at least try one corner." This is the life creed that everyone in the YEPI team agrees with, so when they learned about the 51% unemployment rate in Mombasa, they did not give up, but faced the difficulties. We believe that Naret Intoyie will not give up either. Just like the same belief conveyed by Bill Gates in his 2019 annual letter: "Young people in Africa determine the future of the entire continent and even the world. "