Working girl!

---

I was looking back over some of my past entries and realized that if they didn’t know any better, a casual reader of this blog may think that I’m on some sort of extended holiday here in Kenya. Baby elephants, beaches, snorkeling, exotic get-aways to idyllic islands in the Indian Ocean - I could understand their confusion. I think I need to set the record straight and use this blog to explain a little more about what I’m dong here (read: justify myself to those of you in very cold, economic-crisis stricken countries).

As you probably know, I’m a VSO volunteer, placed in a Mombasa based NGO called Solidarity with Women in Distress (Solwodi) to help them become a more sustainable organization. At the moment, they have sporadic, unreliable funding and my job is to help them develop a fundraising plan that will allow them to reach their objectives and create their desired impact, and put in place the systems and skills necessary for implementing said plan. Easy peasy, eh?

Solwodi is quite a small organization, although it currently employs 16 people. Most of them work in the main Mombasa office (where I work) and the some of the others are based in other towns in Coast province where Solwodi runs peer education programmes among the sex workers (mostly female) in those communities. The other towns are, to the West: Voi, to the South: Ukunda, and to the North: Mtwapa, Malindo and Watamu.

As well as running HIV prevention and education programmes with commercial sex workers, Solwodi also provides the ladies with a way out of sex work, should that be their choice. They can access counseling, skills training, vocational courses and business skills management training and support as well as seed capital for them to start their own small businesses. Similar services are provided to girls who are considered to be “at risk” of entering sex work. How this assessment is made is a case-by-case process, but generally, children who don’t attend school, come from economically depressed backgrounds and whose parents are involved in the sex trade are considered to be candidates for this programme. Instead of vocational training, Solwodi pays for these children to remain in school and further their education through the official route. Solwodi also provides counseling, rehousing and resettlement support to victims of human trafficking. These people (mostly women and children, but also some men) have been take from their homes either by force or under false pretences to elsewhere in the country or abroad, and have been exploited, not always, but often for sexual purposes. There are other small projects, but these are the main ones.

So, Solwodi does a lot of good work, but one of the biggest frustrations for many of the staff is that there are never enough funds to support all the clients who require support. Often girls have to be turned away or put on a waiting list for support that can often be over 1 year long.

I spent quite a long time at the beginning of my placement just finding out about Solwodi, what it does, and how it operates internally. The staff took me out with them on visits and spent a long time explaining the ways things work and the achievements and challenges they face every day. Their dedication and talent was so hugely impressing that I was initially overwhelmed and left wondering what I could possibly do that would improve their working lives. I soon realized that although many things were seemingly operating, there were many ways things that could be improved and so I set to it.

The first thing to do was rectify the fact the Solwodi did not have a strategic plan in place. It is imperative for an organization to be able to fully articulate where they want to go and how they want to do it before they start fundraising, so we are currently in the process of developing that. We held a workshop about a month ago and all the staff participated in designing new strategic objectives and almost more importantly, enjoyed the bonding time and the great food we had provided. At the end they all volunteered (not without some serious prompting, I’ll admit) to write the sections of the plan themselves and we are now well on the way to having a strategic plan printed and disseminated by June. However, the fun does not stop there - once we’ve finished that then we will develop a resourcing plan to explain how Solwodi will finance the plan it has developed. To encourage sustainability, the organization should move away from relying solely on international donors and start to look closer to home for funds and even earning money through activities itself. As the staff have many ideas for income generating activities, I have no doubt that the process will be very swift and efficient!

Following a swift assessment of the various skills and experience my colleagues have, I’m also developing an individual capacity building plan to fill the gaps where they exist. Many people have received a lot of training in various areas, writing proposals for example, but have not ever been given the chance to develop the skills through actually writing any proposals themselves. As well as developing some short training workshops to fulfill some of the needs, I’m planning the individual support to be more hands-on mentoring so as to expose my colleagues to the work in the areas they miss and help build their confidence.

More recently, my closest colleague, Evelyne who is the programme officer at Solwodi and I have been thinking of other areas that need addressing whilst I am here. In particular the monitoring and evaluation systems (although system may be a bit of a big word for what currently happens) need redesigning to streamline them and capture more comprehensive data. Increasingly, impact evaluation is becoming more and vital (I guess it always was, but the need is certainly articulated more nowadays) and so Solwodi needs to ensure that it can deliver on assessing the big picture changes it is making in the communities in which it works.

Anyway, so that is a brief overview of what I’ve been doing for the last 6 months - all very far from the beach, I can assure you! I arrive to work at 8 in the morning and don’t leave until 5 so the days are pretty full and can be very intensive. The office is pretty smart, although I don’t have a computer and use the shared ones that the other staff work on when they need to deliver reports. Internet access is not regular, so sometimes we have to go to the local cyber cafés to submit proposals and otherwise get online. I gate out the office maybe once a week or so to visit other officers or attend meeting with partners or donors in other parts of town. I’m getting used to Kenyan time, and am now adept at turning up to meetings late so as not to waste my time sitting around and waiting for others to arrive. Maybe not the most constructive approach to time management, but I figure that its not what I’m here to improve, so I’m going to let it slide! Actually, there are many small and large things that people do or don’t do in the working environment, that I’m sometimes tempted to comment on and make suggestions around, but I think it would be too easy to take on fighting too many battles and not make any real ground on any of them so I generally just let things lie. Accepting cell phone calls in meetings, paper wastage, poor data management, no filing, crappy meeting minutes, the list is endless, but I’m just letting it all wash over me!

---