Temaet for uge fem var “going public”,
herunder ”citizen journalism”. Vi tog tilbage til Kibera for at skrive artikler fra et område, der ellers har et ret ensidigt ry, og hvis
indbyggere er stigmatiserede. Anne Bro, Eddie Robert og jeg skrev nedenstående artikel.
Kiberian youth and job opportunities
Kibera is a slum area
in Nairobi. With around one million
residents, it is the biggest slum area in Africa. Around 50 % of all people in
Kibera are unemployed. To learn about the conditions and opportunities of life
as a young Kiberian, we met three young persons living in Kibera.
The 22 years old Washington Gwaah belongs to the small percentage
of young employees in Kibera. He was born and raised in the slum and has also graduated from high school
here. After high school, he wanted to follow his passion for designing and
sewing clothes. But in Kibera, it is difficult to get a job without any kind of
education. With that in mind, he applied for college to study clothing design
to improve his designing skills. But finishing the designing course was not
enough to get a job. It took him two years and financial support from his
friends to get his dream started. He bought an old Swan sewing machine and
rented a stall. He was now ready to be a clothing designer. But being a
clothing designer in Kibera takes a lot of hard work.
He works from early morning
to late evening. However, he doesn’t earn a lot of money. Generally, he makes
800 ksh for a pair of jeans. But 500 ksh of the 800 ksh goes to fabric material
and the last 300 ksh is for rent and food. If he has enough clients, in one day
he can produce 2-3 pair of jeans. This is because his sewing machine isn’t made
for making jeans. The needle bar is too fragile and is made for sewing in
thinner fabric than jeans fabric.
But the many hours of work
and the difficult work conditions doesn’t stop him from dreaming. He dreams
about becoming a big designer and having his own employees. Kibera is not
involved in this dream though. He wants to move away if he gets the
opportunity. “Life in Kibera is tough” he says. “Nobody likes it.”
Loreen Vihenda is a 22 years old woman living in Kibera. She has
been living in Kibera for 16 years. Before living here, she used to live with
her parents at Huruma estate, and afterwards she moved for settlement in
Kibera.
Even though Loreen’s parents
are working, she finds it very difficult to live in Kibera as a young person.
She looked at the life her sister passed through before getting a job in a
hotel in Nairobi. After high school, her sister had spent five years at home
before getting a job. She finds this bad for her because she has to rely on her
parents even for her basic needs.
By all this, Loreen has been
trying to get a job so that she can help her parents pay her fees and her
siblings’ fees who are still in school. Loreen thinks that life in Kibera is
tough because she hasn’t been able to get a job and therefore still depends on
her parents for food and shelter. This doesn’t keep her from dreaming of a good
job, a comfortable life and also moving away from Kibera to a better estate for
a better life.
Joseph Alphonse, aged 27, is living in a small house together with
his fiancé. He is engaged in a community organisation called Pillars of Kibera
that is creating and performing forum theatres in the community. In 2003 after
he left high school, Joseph was one of five founders of the organisation.
Joseph and some few others were trained to do thematic presentations in Kibera
by Care International Kenya, a development and humanitarian organisation. Today,
Pillars of Kibera has 45 members between the age of 18 and 30. The organisers
and the artists get some payment for every performance that they present, but
this is not enough to be able to afford paying rents and food. The life quality
of the organisation members depends on how many shows they perform each month.
This is why Joseph encourages the other members to do different things in
addition to the organisation work and to save money for less productive times
in the future.
Joseph and four other members of the
organisation have a small barber shop and a beauty shop “to raise a few coins”
as he says. The founding of the shops was supported by Pillars of Kibera, that
donated the necessary machines for the shops and today the shops provide a
certain percentage of their profit to Pillars of Kibera.
As one of the successive stories of
Kibera, Joseph has a positive view on Kibera’s future. He is happy to be a
Kiberian even though life can be tough sometimes. He explains how the amount of
social work in Kibera has been exploding over the past 15 years. “In 1999 only
five youth groups existed in Kibera. Now there are about 3000 youth groups”.
Joseph believes that “everyone has a talent and something to give out, but
things doesn’t work smoothly”. Today, most Kiberian children get an education
but most schools of Kibera are not government schools and this means that the
school certificates rarely can be used outside Kibera.
How do Joseph’s future dreams look like? He
wants Pillars of Kibera to be an NGO that will be able to employ a great amount
of people. Personally he dreams of being able to support himself without
Pillars of Kibera and he believes his many connections in Kibera give him
different opportunities. But he cannot leave the group behind. When he turns 30,
he will use his opportunity to become a member of Friends of Pillars of Kibera,
a supportive group of the organisation.
Joseph cannot imagine leaving Kibera
either, even though he one day might be able to provide for himself without the
organisation; “Maybe I will extend the size of my room, but I will stay in
Kibera and give hope to other people. If I leave Kibera, how am I supposed to
help people here?”
These three young Kiberians
show that it is difficult to live in the slum area and that it takes hard work
to get a job, but they have proven it possible to get an education, to open a
business and to start an organisation. Because of the hard conditions in
Kibera, most of the young residents dream about leaving Kibera, but there are
also people like Joseph, who are willing to stay in Kibera and create opportunities
for young people in the area.
