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.

Working for the regional headquarters that covered countries in the East (including the Great Lakes region) and Horn of Africa, it was hard not to come across the toll that war/ civil conflict took on people and I got interested in an emergent field that was trying to prevent aid from inadvertently causing more conflict.

“I decided to learn more about this conflict resolution as I thought that it was fascinating and really wanted to sink my teeth into this and find out more. So I enrolled at the University of Massachusetts in Boston’s Master of Arts programme in Dispute Resolution. And I learned a lot and also during my time there, I then got really interested in the role that technology can play in the non-profit work.”

After acquiring this degree, she went to work for the Centre for the Prevention of Genocide, in the state of Virginia.

The interesting element of this is the technology that the centre was putting to use in its work. She says she was attracted to their mission—that you can use the technology to detect and prevent mass atrocities.

“That if you’ve built a network of groups on the ground that are reporting on gross human rights violations (detection) and you’ve also built up the network to connect with policy makers and the media (prevention), that maybe you can create an early warning and prevention system for genocide and mass atrocities, “she says.

She then got immersed in that world— learning on the fly how to talk and work with Congress/ congressional staffers, and how to work with the US media. The first inkling of how useful this could be was when the Darfur atrocities first started coming to light.

Unacceptable deaths
“The importance of helping groups get their information out was brought home because as early as early 2003, we had people from the Darfurian diaspora coming to tell us of atrocities that were being carried out.

So we were working to try and get some traction for this story— with people on the Hill and the media – but without more information , we were not able to go far. It took between one and a half and two years for the story to go mainstream.

And in the meantime, there’d been many unacceptable deaths. This just underscored the need to get groups to get info on their work to the right people as easily and as efficiently as possible,” she says.

Mendi Njonjo – an alumnus of Ngandu Girls and the University of Nairobi— is one of those lucky people who can see the direct impact of their work.

“Up in Gulu, it’s motivational as every time I go there, that’s when you know for sure and for true that peace is not some nebulous concept. It’s a very concrete, touchable thing. This can be seen in the buildings that are going up almost overnight, the sheer numbers of people who teem the streets simply because they can. They’re out shopping, walking on the streets because they no longer have to be in the shelter of the IDP camps. There’s an almost tangible buzz and I love being part of that— seeing people go back home to work their fields, to rebuild their homes, start businesses after years of being stuck in camps. It’s very, very rewarding.”

Her inspiration? ‘That thing inside people that makes people ask “why not?” You usually see the dark side of humanity in my line of work, but I am inspired by the greatness of the human spirit.”

Perhaps best summed up in the title of President Obama’s book – ‘You know – the cheekiness of hope. The effrontery of hope. It’s so ... audacious. That it is possible to traverse a dragon filled ocean. That it is possible to rebuild a life after decades of being harassed by the LRA. I dig that. I admire it. It inspires me.”