The News from Kenya

The drought in California is a leading news story this summer. However, another story of water scarcity from drought-prone Kenya illustrates a possible path for finding solutions to water shortages. The story from Kenya offers a prime example of the practice known as community philanthropy, in which communities come together to solve problems. A report on National Public Radio describes the remote rural community of Makutano’s success managing a water crisis with local assets. (See “Kenyan communities succeed in managing scarce water, where aid projects once foundered.”)

The nine-minute Kenya report is the third segment in a one-hour program on “Global Water Scarcity: Combating Drought,” which starts with the drought in California and then goes international to explore groundwater tensions and solutions. The program is part of a series supported by the Aga Khan Foundation U.S.A. (AKF USA) to highlight the Aga Khan Development Network‘s approach to foster innovation and build local self-reliance.

Students play volleyball at the secondary school founded by MCDA.

The Makutano community has a history of problems with water and drought, but in the 1990s residents pulled together to change this. Now they manage 18 boreholes and 9 wells that serve more than 70,000 people. The radio story starts at a reservoir villagers created in Kenya’s semi-arid region. Led by the Makutano Community Development Association (MCDA), the community together pooled the land and dug the reservoir by hand. They continue to manage the water as a group, chaired by a local woman, Marietta Kasioki.

“From the word go, we started with community and grew with community,” says MCDA co-founder Raphael Masika in the radio story. In the shade of the tree where the group first met, he explained their early process: “We would we cook some food in the open and discuss our affairs.” The priority for water security, he says, “was like a chorus, we want water, we want water, we want water.” When some pointed to the need to address hunger and food security others responded, “If we get water, we get food.” MCDA proved a powerful organization for focusing local energies on local priorities. After tackling the water issue, the community also built a school and a 10-mile road that connects them to the nearest market town. Local incomes have risen, and now homes are sturdier, with galvanized steel roofs. Instead of spending hours fetching water, children go to school every day.

In The Value of Community Philanthropy, a 2012 report released by AKF USA and the C.S. Mott Foundation, author Barry Knight noted initial lessons from the Makutano experience. He identified six factors related to the support that MCDA received from the Kenya Community Development Foundation(KCDF) that were critical to success:

• Have a shared vision and approach
• Support local asset development
• Focus on hardware (resources and organizational development) and software (relationships, power, context, and structural analysis)
• Regulate pace and extent of support in line with community needs and capacity
• Recognize that change needs time and requires multiple actors
• Focus on long-term sustainability

MCDA judiciously used very small KCDF grants over a decade or so, Knight explained to AKF USA in a 2012 interview. Those grants, guided by a strong local commitment and totaling only about $19,000, “enabled the local people to transform that area away from desert into very fertile land.”

The Global Alliance for Community Philanthropy and its members (AKF USA, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the C.S. Mott Foundation and the U.S. Agency for International Development) are working to share such lessons widely and see how international donors can support national efforts like the Kenya Community Development Foundation. As these partners recognize, the transformative capacity of locally guided development is a way toward sustainability against a backdrop of declining development assistance from governments and donors.

The story has more lessons for the development community. A brown-bag event in August hosted by the Society for International Development and the Center for International Private Enterprise will explore A New Strategy for Civil Society Development for Africa. As a member of the panel, AKF USA’s Civil Society Program Officer Natalie Ross will discuss opportunities and challenges for sustainability, including problems with long-term post-donor sustainability that can undermine efforts to build the capacity of civil society in developing countries and the potential for taking a community philanthropy approach.

Read the first part of this series here.