Helen, Jennifer and Grace at the Stone Cold movie screening. Read more here!

It’s that time of the year again – marathon training time! I started training for the Marathon de Montréal 2011 in May just as my first year law exams began. For the rest of the summer, I will be training in Phnom Penh, Cambodia where I am working with LICADHO, a human rights organization. Eventually, I will make my way back to Montreal for September and a final month of running around Mont-Royal.

Last year, a number of you helped donate to Women of Kireka’s School Fundraiser. We have since phased out that program as the women are increasingly able to make ends meet through Women of Kireka’s jewelry sales. We are now hoping to start combining new materials in our jewelry and we are looking for two kinds of generous support: either a donation through ChipIn, which will go directly into buying new jewelry-making tools or materials OR a purchase from the Women of Kireka shop.

Thank-you again to everyone who helped us out last year!

As many of you know, I am running the Montreal Oasis Marathon on September 5th, 2010 – in exactly 27 days! Running the marathon was partly inspired by the need to find a way to help pay school fees for the children of the Women of Kireka. These twenty women, who still work part-time in a quarry for a pittance, now have a small start-up jewelry business, which I helped to establish in 2008 in Kampala, Uganda and now assist through Project Diaspora.

As many of you also know, I’m generally no longer a fan of fundraising. After a couple years working on and off in Kenya and Uganda, and further experience in the “wheel of development,” I have learned to deeply appreciate the value of business. By business, I mean a system where a unique high-quality product, made through painstaking attention to detail, is fairly traded for monetary capital. This seems to be the most sustainable and engaging form of economic development.

In line with this, Women of Kireka has transformed itself from a donations-funded model, where international donors help to raise enough capital for the women to start their own business, to a small start-up business built on hard work by the people who make up the Women of Kireka and Project Diaspora.

However, in order to get Women of Kireka to where it is now, it was necessary to help the women spend a few less hours on the quarry. They identified school fees as one of their most expensive and stressful costs. By covering school fees for a year, Project Diaspora – and your first two round of donations – gave the women enough time to see if Women of Kireka was for them and whether we could build a successful business together.

This generous time has proved to be fruitful and we think that, after this final round of school fee donations, Women of Kireka will be entirely run as a business, no longer soliciting donations. In the little time we’ve had this year, we’ve registered Women of Kireka as a business, opened a local bank account for the women to place their savings, developed an emergency health fund scheme, launched one line of jewelry, developed a website and established a series of local and international partnerships with such groups as Solar Sister.

This final round of school fee donations will give the women the free time to perfect their second line of designs. It will also give us the time to focus on opening the online Women of Kireka store. We expect that these activities, particularly the opening of the online store, will ensure that the women can support their children next year in school and work increasingly with Women of Kireka, thus moving off the quarry for good.

Fortunately, the beginning of the children’s semester coincides with the Montreal Oasis Marathon. As I cross the finish line, the children will be getting ready for their final school term this year and we hope your generous contributions will help us pave the way for a successful new school term!

For more information on the Women of Kireka, please visit our website.

Description:

How to Apply:

New gems from Women of Kireka!

Kim Bilmer (above) began working as a Program Assistant Intern with the Women of Kireka last week. Over the next few months, she will be writing about her experiences on the Project Diaspora blog.

When I finally touched down on African soil, the word “excitement” definitely understated how I was feeling. After years of waiting to come to Africa, and after weeks of anticipation, it was finally time for me to be a part of the continent I had been longing to be a part of for years. Uganda is a country that I have always been drawn to through listening to the experience of past visitors and through reading the stories of those native to the land.  These personal accounts truly strengthened my desire to one day visit this captivating place, and realizing that this would be the country for my first experience in this field of work, only deepened my feelings of excitement.  When I stepped off the plane and felt the blast of heat from the sun, I knew the next few months were going to be fulfilling. I knew this would be an experience I would never forget, and only the beginning of my lifetime journey through Africa.

My first impressions of Uganda were very encouraging. It is always a bit nerve racking to come to a new place that is completely different from what you are accustomed to, but I already seem to have taken to the lifestyle quite nicely here. Compared to other places I have traveled, for some reason I feel more comfortable here in Kampala. The people of Kampala have a very warm and welcoming nature about them. One that makes you feel as though you have been here forever (and could stay forever too)! Although I was initially very anxious to explore Kampala, I was even more anxious to meet my team members and the women at the quarry.

When I first arrived at the quarry it was much larger and even more intimidating than I was expecting. There were many people of all ages scattered throughout this dangerous setting. It was hardly a place for any child to be playing or anyone to have to work without proper safety equipment. Not only was I taken aback by the sight of the quarry itself, but from my first encounter with the women as well. After reading so much about the women and their devastating hardships prior to my arrival, I felt very nervous to meet them and I was unsure how my presence would be received. However, within seconds of my arrival at the top of the hill, they rushed to greet me with welcoming hugs and friendly smiles. The quarry may have appeared dark and dreary at first, but seeing the women instantly added many colours to the surrounding environment. From their vibrant clothing, to their elaborate beads and especially their spirited personalities, the quarry felt full of life and simply inspiring.

The first meeting with the women was designed purely as an introduction in order to explain exactly what I was doing there. Although my shyness was evident throughout my first address to them, I still had a feeling that we were all going to become at ease with each other very soon. All I wanted was for the women to know that I had come for the right reasons. I really wanted them to believe in me. After everything they have been through in their lives, I knew that trusting a stranger might not come easily for them and I hoped I would be able to cross this potential barrier. However, I think I was even more nervous after leaving the quarry the first night. Now that I had met the women, seen their faces and witnessed what they and their children undertake everyday in order to live, my desire for this project to succeed was now at its strongest and I hoped that my efforts here would be able to contribute to the success of this project.

After spending my first week searching for tools, marketing materials, and training options for the women, I knew the second meeting was going to be a busy one. I met a wonderfully resourceful and incredibly clever woman named Evelyn who works with similar women in the north. Although our conception of the jewelry was similar, the jewelry pieces she represented were much more refined and unique. Her business methods were also much more efficient and organized.  My team and I knew immediately that our women could stand to learn a lot from her and that she would be an essential asset to our project. With Evelyn on our side, my teammates and I had a lot to discuss with the women concerning the improvement in the quality of their work and also we needed to introduce the possibility of beginning workshops with Evelyn that would teach new ways of styling and making their work even more creative and polished.

At this second meeting, the women reacted very enthusiastically to these ideas; they realized that with a little help they were very capable of making their beautiful jewelry even better. With this positive burst of energy in the group, we began a photo shoot of each individual woman with their beads for some new marketing ideas. The women took control of the shoot, choosing their own location and poses for each shot. They really made me laugh, displaying their beads humorously all over their bodies and ensuring their poses were action packed.

Unfortunately, at one point the mood fell from light hearted and fun to slightly frustrating as everyone unsuccessfully tried to put together a jewelry order that was to be picked up that day. There was a lot of confusion with the jewelry requests and each woman was very determined and adamant about having their work represented in the order. We originally planned to hold a training session to be included in this meeting, but unfortunately due to time we had to save it for another meeting. We ended by giving the women notebooks and homework. After this second encounter with the women, my teammates and I really started to brainstorm what would be necessary to make certain business practices more efficient.

Presently, the women are mobilized and excited for the next phases of the project, and therefore we definitely want to make things as easy as possible for them in order to keep the momentum up. I loved leaving that second meeting with abundant feelings of optimism at the incredible potential that is all around. I now look forward to my meetings with the women; it is definitely the highlight of my week.  The women, along with my team have made me feel confident in this project. Hopefully as my time here continues, I will be able to see the growth and success of this mission, along with the personal victories of each of these women.

Women of Kireka, a program under Project Diaspora, welcomes two new team members: Hadijah Nankanja and Kim Bilmer. Hadijah was born in Uganda and is an active member in the business and development community both locally and abroad. She will be running a series of capacity-building workshops (English, accounting, business practices and more) with the Women of Kireka. Kim Bilmer is a Canadian working as a Program Assistant Intern. She will be assisting the Project Diaspora and Women of Kireka teams with day to day duties at the quarry, as well as long-term business development and implementation. Welcome!

I have recently joined an international team planning for the Global Youth Participation Week.

The Global Youth Participation Week (GYPW) is an opportunity to help bridge that gap. The GYPW will be a globally coordinated campaign shining the spotlight on youth participation. Imagine:

• a week where not only young people and youth organizations, but also media, policy-makers and civil society will align their attention and efforts for the cause of youth participation;
• a week that will act as a catalyst for funding, mobilization and capacity building;
• a week that will serve as a container for ideas and projects by the young people who want to address some of their existing needs with the opportunities provided by this initiative;
• a week of reflection and action on the context-specific critical challenges that can be addressed by global cooperation;
• a week where local activities are coupled with a global outreach campaign that relies on new and old forms of media;
• a week that practices what it preaches: all efforts will be led by youth, in equal partnership with older generations.

We’re still looking for a few more members to round-out the team. As an international effort, (all) we’re looking for is 8-10 hours a week for a year, as well as a somewhat functioning Internet connection for Skyping.

More information on the Women of Kireka, bead purchases, internship opportunities and quarry visits can be found on Siena Anstis’s website. We’re thinking proxy websites spreading like Western Union across Kampala’s downtown core. Ah, if only we were the Starbucks of East Africa.

The First Drop wants to provoke passionate, informed and accountable discussion among Canada’s next generation of leadership. We plan to do this by supporting a slate of contributors with widely varying views, and pushing them to generate the most enlightening discussion possible. We are now accepting applications for the first round of contributors.

We’re looking for about 20 people who will become the core of the community at The First Drop: our founding contributors, ready to roll as we launch in the next month or so.

Contributors will write 1-3 short articles a month on a topic that matters for Canada’s future. That’s the subject: Canada’s future. In any way you choose. Politics, business, civil society, it’s all good. From what perspective? Legal, artistic, entrepreneurial, military, academic or the snowboard shop. East, West or North (we don’t really have a South, do we?), you’re all welcome. Conservative, Liberal, NDP, Bloc, Green. C’mon in. We don’t care, so long as you can write a good, reasoned, reality-based piece and trigger a great conversation.

Actually, that’s what we really care about – the conversations that emerge from your writing. Have a voice, but no way to get it out there? TFD can be that way. Have a blog or book already? TFD can help you reach a bigger audience and draw in new perspectives. Just want to help us create a community of future Canadian leaders? Great.

Interested? Have a look at our Guidelines to get an idea of what we’re looking for, fire Brendan an email with any thoughts or questions, or just apply and let us know you’re interested.

The original here:

As someone with many un-paid internships under her belt, the word “volunteer” often makes me shudder. But, the facts are, we need your support!

• Programme Assistant Intern (Full-time): This position with the Women of Kireka would involve guiding the women in their current business practices (accounting, savings, establishing micro-loans, etc.), doing marketing & design, escorting visitors to the quarry, and organizing sample shipments/partnerships with local and international organizations.

• Advocacy and Awareness Intern (Full-time): Not long ago, a reader commented that we were not doing enough for the overall Kireka community. Granted, when the women leave the quarry, their jobs will be taken by equally desperate individuals. In order to mitigate this, we would like to run an awareness campaign on the working conditions of the Kireka community among media, community and government. There’s been a trickle of information on the quarry over the years, but we really want to ramp this up and make an impact.

The lovely Hannah Gray will help you organize your internship placements. She has a boat-load of experience in this field and is an expert in all things Kampala (and fun!). If you are interested, please send your CV, cover letter and a short 500-word statement on what you would like to achieve to myself or Project Disapora. Of course, information on the site is limited, but we want to know how creative are!

Note: We’re certainly not as widely known or CV-boosting as UN-name any branch, but we can promise a very engaging experience with the Women of Kireka and Uganda as a whole. We are also expert reference-letter writers. Most importantly, we’ll help you build contacts in the field of international development in East Africa.

1. Protecting Displaced Africa: Selective Rescue, Economist, p. 52

As we are working with internally displaced persons (the Women of Kireka), this article was of interest. On October 23rd, the Africa Union signed a convention stating that “African governments will have to look after their displaced citizens.”

Ironically enough, this happened in Kampala, Uganda, a country with somewhere between 1m and 4m IDPs. In the North, while the IDP camps have mostly shut down, the many who fled the war and ended up poor and marginalized in urban centers like Kampala and Jinja are receiving next to nothing.

Recognizing IDPs is, admittedly, an expensive and messy process. How to differentiate IDPs from the poor? how to determine the best means of relocation, resources or money or both?

Refugee Law Projet is a local organization and a strong advocate for the inclusion of IDP protection in Uganda and elsewhere. For many years, they have been trying to answer these questions and get the government to act. For more information on IDPs, you can consult their website.

2. Migration: A constant Search for Opportunity, The Africa Report, p. 16:

We all know the story of the boat that capsizes killing dozens of refugees on the way to Spain or France. However, a less known story is that of migration within Africa. The Africa Report says that “only a tiny fraction of the 17m African migrants who have chosen to leave their home countries to seek opportunities abroad. The vast majority of them, pershaps, 12 m, have stayed within Africa – often at the same time supporting even larger numbers of people at home.”

The article also highlights new numbers on the Diaspora and their contributions back home.

• African migration has led to more than $23bn in remittances in 2007, approx. $12bn to Sub-Saharan Africa and $11.5bn to North Africa
• The amount of remittances could actually be 50% higher because most migrants send money through informal channels
• In Lesotho, remittances account for 30% of GDP.
• In Cape Verde, Comoros, Lesotho and Uganda, remittances represent over 25% of export earnings

However, as the article also highlights:

[Remittances] do little to change the underlying structures that trap millions in poverty. And some economists believe that beauce remittances are spent on consumption – food, clothing, weddings etc. – they do not encourage development.

In line with this,

Governments need to consider ways to make sending and receiving remittances easier for migrants and their families. Doing so would increase the productivity of the money they send and it may benefit scores more – as well as make additional small but important differences at the household and community level.

Ken Banks, the one-man team behind kiwanja.net, is a powerhouse. His output of interviews, blog posts, Twitter updates and other social media tricks speaks to his determination to contribute to the emerging realm of information and communication technology for development or ICT4D.

Inspired by over a decade of work in Africa, Banks launched kiwanja.net in 2003. The website is a space where “technology meets anthropology, conservation and development.” Attentive to the need for easy communication between NGOs and their rural partners, the website also serves as a launching point for Banks’ creations.

In 2005, Banks rolled out of the organization’s first big coup, an open source software called Frontline SMS. Five weeks, a summer in Finland, and a crash course in programming produced a mobile phone tool now widely acclaimed by both IT experts and grassroots users.

Let’s talk about inspiration. What pushed you to launch Kiwanja.net and Frontline SMS?

kiwanja.net started in late 2003. The first contract I had happened to be dealing with mobiles. It became very clear to me that the knowledge and information I was building up with this charity was clearly of wider value. There were lots of organizations who were also thinking about mobile technology and thinking about how they might apply it. They were also struggling.

Through kiwanja.net, I decided to really focus on trying to help organizations understand what mobile technology can do for them … Frontline SMS came out of a need for there to be a solution to get on the [ICT] ladder, the first rung in many cases. It’s all very well to read about mobile phones [and their use in development] in the popular press, but the first thing NGOs ask is, ‘What can we do?’ ‘What can we use to do that?’ In 2005, when I wrote Frontline SMS, there didn’t seem to be any tools that were specifically written to work in the kinds of environments that these NGOs found themselves in.

So, when they were asking the question, ‘What can we use to start delivering mobile services?,’ the answer was, well, unless you have the internet and a bunch of money and a certain degree of technical skills, there isn’t actually very much. That seemed crazy. So, Frontline SMS was developed out of that need. I felt that there was a big gap in the market, so to speak, of mainly grassroots non-profits with little money, no internet and very, very, very low technical skills to actually start to deliver SMS services.

What does “Kiwanja” mean? How does it represent your vision?

In 2003, when I started it off, there was a lot of “tech365″ style names. It was all very high tech. And for me, it wasn’t really about the technology. It never really was about the technology. It’s about how people interact with technology. It’s about building things that work for people. And technology is the thing you consider right at the end when you are looking to trying to solve a problem. So, I wanted a name which didn’t convey anything technology-based, didn’t sound like technology was the main thrust. Kiwanja can mean a lot of different things in [Kiswahili], but I think “a place to meet” is my favorite one.

Can you explain the basic function of Frontline SMS?

You basically turn a laptop or desktop computer with a mobile phone into a two-way group messaging hub. So, you download the software onto the computer, you plug in a phone, you enter the cell numbers of your farmers, health care workers, and then you can send messages to those people and they can respond. Basically, you coordinate two-way messaging through a lap top. There is no need for the internet since it runs off the mobile phone network.

How is Frontline SMS being used?

I think the most surprising thing for me was that within a week of launching the software in the fall of 2005, the activist community jumped straight onto it. The first user was in Zimbabwe. Within a week, they had started using it to send and receive messages to and from rural communities that were being badly treated by Mugabe and his regime. Since then, it has become a lot more solid in other areas. It has been used in a lot of election monitoring projects … We [also] have a lot of activity in health [and] agriculture.

[Frontline SMS] is moving into other areas which I did not actually anticipate. But, I think the beauty of the software is that it does not try to solve any specific problem in any specific place. I really wanted to avoid doing that – although the idea came from a specific place and a specific problem – I didn’t build in anything that would restrict it in any way.

Does empowerment play a key role in Frontline SMS?

The logo of Frontline SMS is those arms stretched up in the air. So, we have decided that empowerment is a key message. I think that [empowerment] is a word that is overused a lot in this space, there’s a lot of different ways of defining empowerment. I think for me the purest form is that you [give people the tools] that they need to do their job better and then you let them decide whether or not they want [it]. Then you provide the tool and you don’t try to be controlling in any way. You say, ‘Hey, if you want to use it, the software is free, we’ll support you for free, we’ll connect you with other users, we’ll do all we can. But, at the end of the day, it’s your project and you do it your way.’ And if it works, please tell us.

How is the growing buzz around social media and ICT influencing your work?

… I still think there is a general misunderstanding or lack of knowledge over how empowering technology can be. When I speak at conferences about what Frontline SMS is doing, and mobiles are doing in general, people generally say “Wow!”. Even operators and technical people working in the industry. So, I think the fact that [now] there’s a lot of focus now on Twitter’s use in Iran and social media and Ushahidi, a lot of people are really [getting] quite onto this. I think what I do tends to fit quite neatly into that bucket … When Frontline SMS first started in 2005, there wasn’t anything else like it, and no one was really building tools like that in developing countries for users. Now there’s a lot more activitiy, I guess it gives it a home. When you speak to people, they can see it in the wider picture of ICT4D.

I think some of the challenges are that you get to the point where there are too many tools and people are reinventing wheels too often and people aren’t really building things that people can use, [instead] they are building ‘sexy’ stuff. I think donors are always looking to fund the next big thing, but quite often the next big thing isn’t going to be of use to a rural farmer in Uganda because it will be using a technology that isn’t available to them. So, I think we have a slight tension now in ICT4D. It’s become a very serious discipline, people are trying to build smart sexy things that actually don’t work in the environments they think they should work in.

What can you say about the rise of ICT innovators in developing countries?

… We’re finding an increasing number of programmers emerging in developing countries who are finally getting access to the world through the Internet and are being taught relevant skills at university. This has come at the exact same time as the open source [movement]. It’s perfect timing. You can imagine ten years ago if African developers had all of this [training] and yet couldn’t get their hands on any open source code to do any of the work. Finally, we have people in the country where [ICT] tools are useful and who have the ability and skills to take these projects and adapt them. Ushahidi coming out of the election crisis is a fabulous example of Kenyans reacting to a particular problem.

Part of the challenge now, once these services are developed, is how they are rolled out and marketed. There’s a guy in Kenya who built a car tracking system by SMS, he wrote it all himself, but he couldn’t get any funding to develop it as a product. So, innovating is one thing. If you’re then stuck with nothing to do with that product, that’s another problem that hasn’t quite been solved yet.

Where are you planning on taking Kiwanja.net?

I think for me it’s about continually pushing the boundaries, continually trying to lower the barrier as much as possible so that grassroots NGOs can use my technology. So how low can we go? Frontline SMS is a great example of lowering it to a point where NGOs can do things. But, if you think about what it requires, a PC, that’s a barrier. So, can we build a version that runs off a USB stick? You could go to an internet café and plug it in and do a bunch of messaging and leave. We are currently working on that at the moment and it could be very exciting.

Also, hopefully within the next three months, we’re going to launch a picture messaging version, Frontline Multimedia Messaging Service or MMS. That will allow NGOs working in areas where there is actually web access through the cell network to transmit audio, video, pictures and sound to and from handsets and to and from the internet. That’s potentially quite interesting: farmers could take a picture of a pest on their crop and send it to an agricultural expert to get advice or a health care worker could take a picture of something on a patient and get advice on what to do. Once again, let’s see how far we can lower the barrier of entry to that.

I am also thinking about how we can allow NGOs to get cheaper messaging using internet related services. So, I’m looking to build a sort of SMS gateway on the internet which non-profits can gather around and get cheap messaging through. We can build a database of users, leverage all the value of all messages being sent and get the best price. People, right now, are buying a hundred messages here and ten there and twenty there and they’re paying the highest rate. So, if all those people are buying a million a week, let’s buy a million a week together and all get the cheapest price.

Ken’s work – and the work of the many other tech developers out there in this field – is incredibly inspiring. If you happen to be one of them, please give us a shout – we’d love to hear more. If the above was a bunch of garble to you (or interesting!), check out kiwanja.net and keep track of Ken’s blog.