Kenyan sees philanthropic path in ICT training

Think you’re clever? Then tell me, what is the common denominator between Mahatma Gandhi, Facebook and oppressed people? No idea? Read on.

In the popular mind, advocacy, social justice and human rights are concepts that belong to, and are promoted by, groups of meddlesome troublemakers.

There’s a new breed of social justice advocates out there, who bring their passion for making life’s wrongs right, and combine it with hard-nosed considerations of what can be realistically achieved.

They are also adept at using technology to ensure that their work is, not just made easier, but that their results and findings are distributed to wider audiences, and in ways that means these audiences can get involved.

Ms Mendi Njonjo has such a passion for what she does, and such a clear way of expressing it, that I was tempted for a moment to cede this space to her and let her tell her own story. However, since we must frame the narrative in a way that makes sense, here’s the outline.

Ms. Njonjo is the director for Africa Programmes at the Advocacy Project (AP), a Washington DC-based nonprofit whose main field operations are in Uganda.

“At AP, we help social justice and human rights organisation become better advocates by helping them in the way that they use, produce and disseminate information,” says Ms Njonjo.

The advocacy that Ms. Njonjo is involved in, is all about taking a present circumstance and transforming it into desired outcomes, or as Mahatma Gandhi put it — ‘becoming the change we wish to see.”

According to Ms. Njonjo, then, ‘if a group cannot effectively translate “what is” into “what should be”, then they’re dead in the water and change becomes remote. So that’s where we come in.

One of our biggest things is in getting the tools that are out there in the public domain into the hands and tool kits of non profits.

This is especially true for ICTs and in particular social networking tools—Facebook, Change.org, Twitter, blogging platforms to help create change for communities out there.”

Her job entails supporting people to tell their own stories — “I support our people in the field (peace fellows) ; help carry out training on how to produce information (press releases, web copy, interacting with the media, etc); help train techies on how to adapt ICTs for their organisation’s information needs (training and support in helping groups get the hardware/ software they need) and also training and support in disseminating their information (mailing lists, web sites and just as importantly using social networking —blogs, Facebook, Twitter,” she says.

Successful advocacy
“My job also involves being constantly on the lookout for groups that are doing successful advocacy in their own settings and continuously trying to infuse these lessons learned into tactics, techniques of successful advocacy that works for our partners here in Africa.”

For someone who is such a keen advocate for what she does, it is rather surprising that Ms. Njonjo more-or-less came into her avocation by happenstance.

“Right after undergraduate, I basically stumbled into working for the International Red Cross in Nairobi. I knew that I wanted to work for a group like the Red Cross, but nothing more concrete than a vague desire to help others.