Kristof: Urban Kenyan slum has something to teach the world

Against all odds, Kibera is a place of hope, and it offers a lesson in bottom-up development.

NAIROBI, Kenya — Here in the Kibera slum, life sometimes seems a free-for-all. Residents steal electricity by tapping into overhead lines, children walk barefoot through alleys trickling with sewage, and people occasionally must dodge “flying toilets” — plastic bags that residents use as toilets and then dispose of by hurling them in one direction or another.

Yet this is an uplifting slum. Against all odds, Kibera is also a place of hope, and it offers a lesson in bottom-up development that the world should learn from.

The tale begins with a boy whose single mom — 15 years old when she gave birth — named him Kennedy, because she wanted him to be like an American president she had heard of. Little Kennedy Odede didn’t attend formal school, and at the age of 10 he ran away from a violent stepfather and ended up sleeping on the streets.

Kennedy taught himself to read and was inspired by a biography of Nelson Mandela that a researcher shared with him. Kennedy, ebullient and charismatic, then formed a Kibera self-help association called Shining Hope for Communities, better known as SHOFCO.

An American student from Wesleyan University, Jessica Posner, volunteered at SHOFCO and then persuaded Wesleyan to accept Kennedy as a full scholarship student, even though he had never even gone through a real elementary school. Jessica and Kennedy fell in love and married when he graduated.

One of SHOFCO’s early projects was Kibera School for Girls, which recruited some of the most impoverished girls in the slum. Their parents were sometimes illiterate, and one-fifth of those little girls had been sexually assaulted. Yet the girls knew that they were special, and with intensive tutoring they turned into star students, outperforming children at expensive Kenyan private schools.

I am an old friend of Kennedy and have been following his work since my first visit a dozen years ago. One girl I met then, when she was a second grader, is now studying at Columbia University. Her former classmates are studying at four other U.S. universities as well as at Kenyan universities.

Let’s just acknowledge that development is hard, particularly in urban slums that are growing fast around the world. Billions of dollars are poured into the poorest countries, and in Haiti and South Sudan one sees fleets of expensive white SUVs driven by aid organizations; what’s missing is long-term economic development. International aid keeps children alive, which is no small feat. But it has had less success in transforming troubled places.

That’s where SHOFCO is intriguing as an alternative model. Its grassroots empowerment approach has similarities with BRAC, a Bangladesh-based development organization that I consider one of the most effective aid groups in the world, and with Fonkoze, a similar homegrown nonprofit in Haiti.

SHOFCO has spread through low-income communities across Kenya and now boasts 2.4 million members, making it one of the largest grassroots organizations in Africa. It provides clean water, fights sexual assault, runs a credit union, coaches people on starting small businesses, runs libraries and internet hot spots, mobilizes voters to press politicians to bring services to slums, runs public health campaigns and does 1,000 other things.

It succeeds, I think, because it exemplifies a partnership: local leadership paired with a reliance on the best international practices. SHOFCO, for example, adopted deworming and cervical cancer prevention programs that reflect the best international knowledge, and these were accepted by local people partly because they trusted Kennedy.

I often write about poverty, and while the subject can be depressing at times, I also regularly find reason to be inspired.

Kibera still needs sewers, schools and decent roads, but Lauren’s success is a reminder of what a grassroots organization can accomplish against all odds in even the grittiest slum. That fills me with hope. Shining hope.

Nicholas Kristof is a New York Times columnist.