Entry tags:

kenya, tl;dr, writing

What You Can Do To Help Kenyan Journalists Bridge the Digital Divide
Latest (and last??? I hope??) version of a piece on imc-kenya's recent history, response to the election, and need for volunteers and donations. The intended audience is blog and magazine/newspaper readers, and as such it takes some liberty with length and is couched as a personal narrative. I think it's bound for some political blogs or something, not sure. Forward around if you like. If you need a byline that's a little more legit than steph99, ping me. Also, a photo from my friend Douglas, who is available as a freelance photojournalist, HINT HINT. See the rest of his photo essay on displaced people in Nairobi.

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The best excuse I ever had to avoid the dishes came at a big house in a genteel suburb of Nairobi, Kenya.

I was there during the World Social Forum with about 40 independent journalists and tech geeks from all over the world to expand Independent Media Center (Indymedia/IMC) and community radio capacity with the Prometheus Radio Project. I left Philadelphia in a worried tizzy, refreshing my inbox every minute, leaving my chat client logged in everywhere, and my phone set extra loud so I wouldn't miss a word from friends who were already there. I knew they were busy, but I was a little miffed at their sparse communication. I needed news!



When I got there, I was in for a major attitude adjustment. Phone calls and email came in from people back home who were hungry for information. But on this day, like many others, the electric was out. The natural light in the house was so beautiful that I hadn't even noticed until a laptop battery drained. I was helping with the breakfast dishes when the hot water ran out. Then the cold water got weak. That's when we realized the big water tank in the yard was fed by an electric pump, so without electricity, we were out of water. Oh well, no more dishes or showers, no more laptops or minidisks for a while, and certainly no chatting on the Internet. But there was plenty to learn, discuss and share, and we found ways to do it without the tools we were used to relying on.

This is the kind of infrastructure disparity we're talking about when we compare a place like my hometown of Philadelphia, where the Internet literally wafts around in the air, to a place like Nairobi, where many of the tech savvy people we met paid for computer access by the minute in cyber cafes. The examples go on and on - from Paypal refusing to do any business even suspected of being connected to Africa, to lack of competition in wireless carriers, to vendor-provided install programs that immediately choke any computer on the subnet with really vicious viruses. When confronted with these realities, you start to understand just how systematically Africa has been technologically and economically ghettoized.

When we looked to our friends in some of the roughest, poorest, and most ingenious neighborhoods in Nairobi, we got a crash course in how to sidestep lack of resources if there's a problem you need to solve. Want to tell your story but don't have the money to make a film? Start a pirate radio station in a converted shipping container, and camp out in front of the Communications Commission of Kenya until they make you legal, like Koch FM, in the Korogocho neighborhood. Want to teach transmitter building in your community center but don't have an outlet to plug in a soldering iron? Gather some parts and rewire a light fixture into a temporary outlet. That's what Pro-Active Youth did in the Kangemi neighborhood when we spent a day sharing skills, meals, and frank discussions about the joys and brick walls that face youth in our respective hometowns.

After we left, the core groups in Nairobi and Kisumu started planning their next moves, armed with new relationships, renewed energy, and the strength of their combined skills. IMCs represent dozens of cities and regions around the world, but they mostly live on the Internet. Was that model appropriate for a country where many villages don't have land lines, and wired infrastructure has often been leapfrogged in favor of cellular communication and solar energy? The Kenya crew decided it wasn't. They prioritized making content to share via local media like radio and print. They focused on coalition-building, on the networks that would form the sinew of self-directed strength. And it worked.

Before we swept up the champagne corks from our New Year's celebrations, our friends in Kenya had stood in line for hours to vote and nurture their 45-year old democracy. Reports indicate that a clean, peaceful election was derailed by botched tallying, and simmering tensions erupted in Africa's bastion of peace and stability. Our friends have watched these tensions threaten to fracture their country along fault lines of community identity and economic imbalance. They saw neighbors turn against each other, burn down homes, loot, riot, and feel the hand of police slam down on them. Refugees who fled to Kenya from war-torn Somalia and Sudan have frightening glimmers of déjà vu, while bordering nations suffer shortages of food and fuel because transport arteries have ground to a halt. Blaming the conflict on tribalism can distract us from the reality--different constituencies have different interests and levels of power. When power is unequal or abused, people get upset, no matter what continent you're on or how you name your community.

The friends we've contacted are mostly ok, persevering through 4-day water outages and ransacked offices, relocating from their homes in search of safety. Since the election, they've changed their minds about how to use their media capacities. It's time to get news out to the world.

Those of us refreshing our browsers across the ocean have been able to slake our feelings of powerlessness just a little by supporting our allies in Kenya. They already had a website and tons of local talent and for telling stories. They reached out to the Indymedia network so they could concentrate on content, and let us deal with logistics. This renewed partnership means that Kenya.indymedia.org is publishing stories for the first time in almost a year. When I sit down at my laptop in the morning, still in my pajamas, I get to be the first pair of eyes and ears on reporting directly from the source--not filtered through foreign media, not translated through a government mouthpiece, but directly from friends and allies, in the middle of everything. It's an honor and a privilege to facilitate this purest form of independent journalism. This is why networks like Indymedia exist.



The IMC-Kenya web support crew is motivated and enthusiastic, but small and overworked. We are a few busy, lucky, excited people who don't have the capacity to support the Kenya team the way they should be supported – the way we ought to support them if we want to continue seeing the kind of reporting they've produced. We need to post articles, work on design, research ways to use cell phones to get news to the web, and otherwise support the journalists in Kenya until they build their local capacity and take those tasks back. We need editorial, web design, hosting, and SMS gateway support.

The team in Nairobi has outlined very tangible needs. With the economy practically halted, people are looking for work. If your publication wants stories and images from the ground in Kenya, you can hire someone on this team to deliver top-notch reporting and photography. They desperately need funding for cell phone airtime, which can mean the difference between life and death. Text messages in Kenya cost about 7 cents apiece – so literally every cent you donate counts. IMC-Kenya has put together a budget of about $4,000, an attainable sum which they plan to stretch to the limit for things like Internet access and a modest lending library of cameras and recorders to be shared throughout the country. Your donation can also go to help displaced adults and children who left everything they had to get to a safe place. For the past year or more, Urbana-Champaign-IMC has been handling donations to Kenya, and have kindly agreed to continue.

You can be right in the middle of excellent indie reporting and cutting edge technology. To see if there's a fit for you on the tech team or to inquire about freelance writing and photojournalism, please email the IMC-Kenya mailing list at imc-kenya@lists.indymedia.org, and they'll get you sorted. To donate to IMC-Kenya, visit ucimc.org/info/donate, and make a note in the comment field. In the meantime, check out the reporting at
Kenya.indymedia.org.

Will you toss in a bit of your spare time or funds for a sustainable team that's working to expose corruption and encourage peace at home, and help us over here in Internet-land understand the situation and what we can do to make it better? We can't wait to add your talent and passion to this project!