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Hear it from the people

Caroline Griffin, Fundraising and communications officer

In July, I went to Kenya to find out how speculation on basic food commodities has affected people’s lives. I've put together a photo gallery which tells the story of gambling on food from the people's perspective.

Many of the photographs are of people I met who had gone without food for days or been forced to sell their few possessions to feed their families. The price of maize, the Kenyan staple food doubled or tripled in a matter of days, causing unnecessary hardship for the fifty per cent of the Kenyan population who already live below the poverty line.

Additional problems such as drought, unemployment and underlying health problems meant that many families reached crisis point when food prices shot up. Some of the people I spoke to are still picking up the pieces after the events of 2008.

But thanks to the World Development Movement, economists, journalists and development experts are now pointing to food speculation as the most significant cause of food crises, including the current food...

Kenya blog: A trip to Kibera

WDM campaigners James O’Nions and Caroline Griffin are in Kenya to research the effects of food price rises on ordinary Kenyans. James reports on their first visit to Kibera, the huge slum on the outskirts of Nairobi.

Today Caroline and I visited a part of Kibera. We were there to meet a group of women from Kibera Women for Peace and Fairness. The group, which comprises hundreds of women, was formed during Kenya’s post-election violence in 2007, which had its epicentre in Kibera. Women and children were being caught up in the violence, including the police response, and being hit by teargas and worse.

Kibera Women for Peace and Fairness, Kibera slum, Nairobi
Kibera Women for Peace and Fairness, Kibera

When the food crisis hit in 2008, the women mobilised again. The daily wage that one person in Kibera is likely to be able to earn is about 50-150 Kenyan Shillings (around 40 pence). Before the price rises, a 2kg bag of maize meal, or unga, the basic staple, was around 50 Shillings. In order to make it into a meal for a family, they also need paraffin, cooking oil, salt, and ideally some vegetables as well. Yet when the price of maize on world...

Kenya blog: Decolonising the mind

Yesterday afternoon, James, Kiama Kaara from Kenya Debt Relief Network and I drove to Thika, a medium-sized town 40km north east of Nairobi along a bustling road lined with traders, construction workers and shops for a meeting with Zachary Makanya from the PELUM Association.

PELUM, which stands for Participatory Ecological Land Use Management, are a network of civil society organisations and NGOs working with small-scale farmers from East, Central and Southern Africa. Their vision is an inspiring and humbling one and what Zachary told us was very clear. Kenyans are still not seeing an improvement in their quality of life despite decades of aid money being poured into the country by mostly good-intentioned by often ill-informed and patronising donors and NGOs. The effects of aid dependency and the legacy of colonialism mean that the urgent process of ‘decolonising the mind’ must now start in earnest if African nations, Kenya included, are to resist the fierce and bullish march of globalisation and industrialisation, which is already wiping out traditional knowledge, languages, indigenous communities and the natural environment.

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Kenya blog: Dusty roads and maize farms

Over the weekend we visited Makueni, a market town about two and a half hours drive to the south of Nairobi. Driving first down the main road to Mombassa, then turning off to pass through the regional centre of Machakos, we arrived in Makueni after dark with the crickets signing to us. In the big cities, great poverty nestles next to relative wealth, but the further you go into the countryside, the more poverty keeps its own company.

The next day we met Phyllis Nduva, a community mobiliser, and she took us down a long road made of deep, fine, red dust to a village where the community had gathered to hear about Kenya’s proposed new constitution. The constitution is the big news here, with the efforts of the ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ campaigns dominating the headlines, and a referendum due on 4 August. I’ll write more about some of the issues involved later, but this gathering was aimed at educating the community about what they were voting on, even if the official ‘Yes’ campaigners turned up later to rally people to their side.


Phyllis Nduva talks to Makueni farmers about what a new Kenyan constitution will mean for them. Caroline Griffin/WDM

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Kenya blog: On transformative action within the Kibera slum

The Kibera slum in Nairobi is home to around 1.5 million people. That's half the population of Nairobi, squeezed into just 2.5 square kilometres. On the way there, our driver, Charles described the extent of the violence that erupted in Kibera during the 2007 elections. Cars were set alight, men, women and children were beaten as they were forced out of from their homes and pumped with tear gas by the Kenyan police. As we approached the entrance to the slum, Charles locked down the doors and wound up the windows. The public perception of Kibera within Kenya is that it’s a dangerous, lawless place.

Our perception was a very different one. We met with a group of eight women and Sheikh Ahmed Abdulrahim, a community human rights activist for a meeting under a tree just on the edge of the slum. They spread out their scarves on the ground for us to sit on and started to tell us about their campaign and their own personal experiences.

Kibera Women for Peace and Fairness connect the violence in 2007 with the extreme poverty they live in. The unrest was partly to do with a huge hike in food prices, which meant many people could only afford to eat one meal a day. This, and the horrific conditions and deprivation people have to suffer in Kibera led to the overflowing of...

Kenya blog: Microfinance in Africa

While I’ve been in Kenya I’ve been reading a new book by Milford Bateman; Why doesn’t microfinance work? The destructive rise of local neoliberalism. Microfinance has been feted as an effective solution to poverty for the very poor for a number of decades now, and in 2006 Mohammed Yunus, the founder of the first microfinance institution, the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

But Milford Bateman’s contention is that microfinance is not only very bad at ‘lifting people out of poverty’, but that it has only survived and prospered in the mainstream development community because it fits very well with needs of maintaining a neoliberal economic system.

Africa is, of course, now flooded with microcredit lenders, and Kenya is no exception. Bateman’s book is excellent at demolishing the ‘myths’ about the efficacy of microfinance, including the contention that it empowers women. But with particular reference to Africa he argues that what Africa needs is not “a vast reservoir of self-employed traders” but “a robust light industrial foundation … and manufacturing-based enterprises capable of productivity growth.” In fact, he argues, “the proliferation of microfinance...

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