UZIMA Foundation

UZIMA Foundation was registered in Kenya in 1995 as a charitable trust and is now also a registered NGO to work in Kenya, Africa and beyond. UZIMA Foundation recognizes and appreciates the potential and assets inherent in young people; among them innovative spirit, enthusiasm, energy, openness, fair play, courage and optimism.

UZIMA Foundation’s mission is to create social space and promote an enabling environment for Youth Empowerment that facilitates access to decision-making opportunities for young women and men, for holistic improvement of the quality of their lives and that of their communities. The modality through which UZIMA Foundation addresses this mission is the UZIMA Youth group. By December 2005, there were over 100 UZIMA youth groups with over 20,000 members.

UZIMA Foundation envisions informed, skilled and healthy young women and men in Africa proactively working with experienced people to improve the quality of their lives in ways that contribute to creating an environment for sustainable development in their communities and the nation in the context of gender equity.

UZIMA Foundation is playing an active role in the efforts to restore peace in Kenyan communities following the violence that rocked all corners of the country following the announcement of the 2007 presidential election results which were released after a flawed vote tallying processes.. UZIMA Foundation is uniquely placed for this work for a variety of reasons.

1. UZIMA Foundation is a youth based youth-serving organisation focusing on youth empowerment that stimulates young men and women to define, plan for and act to experience improved quality life for themselves and their communities. As most of the violence is being perpetrated by young men, albeit on the instructions of older men, UZIMA youth can relate directly to the concerns and attitudes of those perpetrating the violence and thus can help identify approaches which have a higher chance of succeeding.
2. UZIMA Foundation, in its more than 10 years of existence, has always highlighted the importance of having positive relationships between UZIMA youth and their families and communities. UZIMA Foundation has always worked with the youth in their communities. This means that UZIMA Foundation is deeply embedded in many of the communities which have been affected by the violence. Rather than having to start form scratch to build up effective relationships through which to work, UZIMA is already in a position of trust in many of the affected communities because of the work it has been carrying out for over 10 years.
3. UZIMA Foundation has been running a very successful Alternative to Violence Programme (AVP) for the last 8 years. UZIMA Foundation members have travelled as far as Rwanda and the Middle East to assist in peace efforts in communities rocked with violence. This training and international exposure means that UZIMA Foundation as an organisation has the skills, expertise and experience to carry out effective peace and reconciliation work in communities shaken by violence.
4. UZIMA Foundation, as a national home grown Kenyan foundation active in many parts of the country and with a leadership drawn from all over Kenya, understands the concerns, fears and angers of local communities while retaining a national “big picture” outlook on the crisis.

Contact details

Executive Director: Mrs. Malesi Kinaro

Telephone: +254.20.2726911
Physical + mailing address:
32/203 Mbaruk Road, Golf Course
P.O. Box 4356 – 00200
Nairobi, Kenya

Email: info [@] uzimafoundation.org
Website: http://uzimafoundation.org/

Kibera Women for Peace and Fairness

Contact: Ms. Jane Anyango
Tel: +(254) 722 437 620
Email: nyakodong@yahoo.com

Kibera Women for Peace and Fairness was formed in response to the outbreak of post-election violence in Kenya in January 2008, and the wide-spread destruction of homes and businesses in the Kibera neighbourhoods. Kibera was one of the hardest-hit areas by the violence in Kenya, and women in Kibera are also threatened by the gender-based violence (intimidation, gang-rapes) which has escalated during the recent crisis. The Kibera Women for Peace and Fairness is a platform for the women of Kibera to express their needs and priorities and to work out collective solutions for the reconstruction of their homes and lives.

They have applied for official registration as an organisation from the government, and they meet next to the D.O.’s office every Saturday afternoon to make collective decisions about the way forward in Kibera.

Nourishing hope in Kibera

When I met her, nothing in the lovely smile that never seems to leave her face betrayed the things that she has experienced. Yet something, maybe her dry wit, gives her the ability to let go of wounds and wake up each day with fresh enthusiasm.

I stumbled into Uzima Foundation in Kibera by coincidence and listened with mounting curiosity as the charismatic team took me through the ways they encourage youthful minds to build their self esteem and hone their skills and talent. I was very keen on meeting a product of this labor of love.

Enter Maureen, a girl born and brought up in a Kibera “village” called Kisumu Ndogo twenty-six years ago.

Maureen’s brief stint in Kisumu in a school called Pand Pieri (Hide Your Behind—a warning against hungry hyenas on the prowl) was followed by high school in Nairobi. Maureen was involved in drama, dancing, and sports and during Sunday mass was one of the graceful dancer-singers. Her free-time visits to the sick and the old drew her to join Uzima Foundation while still in school.

Maureen is the chairperson of Kibera Uzima Youth Group, plays football for the Kibera Uzima girls’ team (as striker, doubling up as goalie), weaves hats and baskets to make money, still dances, acts and sings to send out positive messages. She is a peer educator, a friend, a daughter, a lady, she is just . . . Maureen.

In Kibera, gang wars, landlord-tenant standoffs, and more everyday madness periodically break the peace, but the post-electoral violence that rocked the nation at the end of 2007 ushered in the 3rd World War. Maureen was at a friend’s place watching TV. As the election result was announced, Kibera cried out. People left their houses crying and wailing like they had lost a relative.

Kibera began to burn that night.

Maureen watched as smoke and screams rose in the diminishing light of dusk. Her phone rang: her worried father wondering if she were safe. The killing had started, and no one sane left any kind of a safe haven that night. Maureen stayed up mulling over the violence outside and wondering whether her friends and family were going to live through it.

Before long, Kibera had no food. With the violence escalating, the settlement was cut off from the rest of the world, save for a few courageous humanitarian organizations. Bitter fights broke out as nerves grew raw with pain, frustration, and hunger. Long queues for rations wrapped the fields surrounding the District Officer’s headquarters. Maureen could not stop thinking about those who had neither youth nor energy to fight.

Uzima Foundation called up their youth leaders to assist, and Maureen made a case for the bedridden and weak. She walked door to door for two days through Soweto West and East, Raila, Mashimoni, and most of the twelve villages of Kibera. She identified households in distress, and Uzima put in place a voucher system to enable relatives or friends to collect food supplies for 120 homes.

Many were bedridden due to HIV and had missed doses of life-saving antiretroviral medication. On visits with Uzima field officers, Maureen tried to leave each household with a handful of hope—for a solution, a miracle, or even just the realization that they were not alone. The task was physically and emotionally draining, yet Maureen’s steps did not falter.

One sick lady hadn’t eaten for days, and her five children watched their mother disintegrate as she tried to wash a pile of raggedy teddy bears outside their house. One of the children told her mother that the rice a neighbor had donated was cooked. The child was too young or perhaps too scared to turn off the stove, and the mother was too weak to get up. A kind neighbor quietly came to help, a role Maureen suspected she may have been playing for some time.

Maureen’s lowest point came when she met a young man walking ever so slowly, obviously in a lot of pain. Initially, as the bullets rained and everyone took cover, he didn’t even realize he had been shot. Then he saw the blood, a lot of it, and mercifully lost consciousness. Good Samaritans rushed him to hospital and paid for his emergency treatment—he still did not know who. His leg now seemed infected and had lost most of its functionality. As he balanced on one leg, tears filled his eyes. He had just returned from the hospital, he told her, but could not afford the medication prescribed. He was just glad to be alive, if barely.

Maureen was key to a forum Uzima set up to provide counseling and enable people to express their fears, hopes, pains, and sorrows without fear of retribution or rejection. One man felt that he had seen enough policemen for a lifetime. He broke down as he shared how his son had been shot dead, and how he had now lost his son’s soul by burying him in Langata Public Cemetery instead of in his ancestral home—impossible to reach due to the volatile situation.

A younger man impishly suggested that mass-action marches in Kenya ought to be staged with children at the front, followed by naked women with babies on their backs and men at the back. This way, there would be no bullets, no violence—or so he hoped.

One lady did her best to exorcize the past for all who had suffered in Kibera and around Kenya, sinking to her knees and crying out,

“For those who stole votes,
Kneel and repent!
For those who killed and chased their neighbours,
Kneel and repent!
For those who burnt people, homes and shambas,
For those who did shopping [looting], vandalized and broke the law,
All tribes of Kenya get down on your knees and pray. . . .
Shame the Devil. . . .
Ishindwe [He will not win]!”

As people began to pick up their lives, their painful burdens lightened once they shared them. They returned to Kibera with a new resolve to find peace amongst each other. After all, we have to start somewhere.

And so Maureen, one of Uzima Foundation’s buzzy bees, helped set an inspiring precedent, endlessly trying, endlessly vying for sustained peace in Kenya. Forgetting her own fears and her own tears, she stayed steadfast and true to the words of our Kenyan anthem: “Natukae na udugu,/Amani na uhuru./Raha tupate na ustawi—May we dwell in unity,/Peace and liberty./Plenty be found within our borders . . . ”.

Maureen, a true shujaa [heroine], is a brilliant flicker of hope for this wonderful nation.

Sikiliza is a Nakuru-based Writer & Photographer who has a passion for Africa and writes in her blog http://msikiliza.blogspot.com/

Nyaminwa

No one would ever call her pretty. She is too strong, too urgent, too passionate for that. No one would ever deny, however, that she is exceedingly, even disturbingly, beautiful.

Sitting under a maroon Java House umbrella, I watch as she talks. She listens as if attempting to mine a hidden heart of meaning, her eyes searching, probing, glued on your face. She does not look away from problems, and she does not back down, either.

Her name is Jane Anyango, and she is the eloquent leader of Kibera Women for Peace and Fairness. This means that she thought up and organized this growing and increasingly vocal collective—spoke it into being, fought it into shape, coddled it into cooperation, still inhales and exhales its breaths. Jane Anyango is a fighter, which is why she is a peace-builder in Kibera.

The women meet under a tree in a field to discuss issues of relevance to themselves and other Kibera women, like burned-down homes and missing husbands, gang rapes and hungry children. They also meet to laugh, and sing, and exchange news and gossip and strength. Jane Anyango speaks of them with affectionate respect: her heroes, her neighbours, her friends.

We are sitting in Adams Arcade, a no-man’s-land shopping strip claimed by both impoverished Kibera and comfortable Woodley, and sometimes even upper-caste Karengata. I look around and remember when a bakery here sold the world’s best queen cakes. Now the arcade is pulling the shreds of its dignity around it, bedraggled as they are, pretending not to notice the upstart glitter and flash of Nairobi’s contentiously jump-started economy all around.

Adams Arcade will always be circa 1976 and fading. But Jane Anyango is glowing with the pressing urgency of now. The problems women in Kibera have, now. The distribution of relief resources, now. The cessation of violence and destruction, now. The empowerment of women, now.

We had planned to meet in Kibera near Jane’s small secretarial bureau and her two-room home, shared with two of her children and her husband, Barnaba. Her two eldest, Bob and Anne Clair, are away at boarding school. She is an exacting mother, Jane says, because she wants her children to profit from her mistakes, build upon her experiences. She has packed a lot of the latter into her 37 years—but, as she reminds us, her 18th birthday was spent in her matrimonial home.

She had not planned on getting married so young. When she interrupted a trip from Nyanza to visit her sister in Embu, Nairobi relatives influenced her to spend time with a man who later became her husband. Back then, she had found herself pregnant, with a field of narrowing options and a suitcase, standing in the dark outside the home of the man whose child she carried while his girlfriend cooked and cleaned inside.

Jane had changed our meeting place, and sitting now at Adams, I ask why she is herself, what accounts for her existence in the world as she is now. Her answer is full of girlhood and growing up and the pain of women’s shared knowing. Jane had a sister, nyaminwa,* Anne, who died in 1999. Fully preventable human error and a drug overdose in hospital left a family in mourning and dazed improvization. Anne’s husband, wrecked by his loss, had a stroke and soon followed her into that not-so-good night. Later, Anne’s daughter Juliet, short-changed at birth by more medical malpractice, died aged 14, even though Jane tried every means in her power to get help for her physical challenges.

As a bright Form Two student, Jane had been attacked by a man on the long walk home. She left school after fourth form with a fourth-division hardly-pass. Not long ago in Jane’s neighborhood, a 39-year-old man had been caught defiling an 11-year-old. Amidst police wisecracks, the little girl’s wide-eyed incomprehension, the paedophile’s unrepentant boastfulness, his wife’s resignation, and the Kenyan legal system’s ponderous callousness, the case had come to nought.

And then, in January 2008, during Kenya’s post-election orgy of violence, the police shot dead a 15-year-old girl as they hunted door to door for the young men who tore up the railway tracks through Kibera—and Jane Anyango had had enough. At their first press conference shortly thereafter, Kibera Women for Peace and Fairness had pointedly appealed, woman-to-woman, to Lucy (Kibaki) and Ida (Odinga) to please make their men see some sense. They also suggested that the Kibaki and Raila offspring consider the fates of youths their own age in the slums and talk to their fathers about it.

It should have been enough to make any woman bitter, but Jane had a father who loved her. Her eyes lose focus as she recalls him. “I was Daddy’s girl, even though I was the fourth-born girl. He was so proud of me! Because I did well in school,” she explains, insistent that I understand. It was Jane’s father who made sure she attended a computer-training course, even though she had protested leaving her growing family. In the years since, she has had cause to be grateful for his insistence on his girls’ self-sufficiency. Jane has worked in factories, as an office clerk and secretary, and now as bureau owner, in between her growing duties as the reasonable but firebrand feminist from Kibera. Women from Karen seek her support now, and she has been on radio shows and in the news, but Jane Anyango has her priorities straight. “The women in Kibera know what we want,” she explains calmly. “It would be good if someone listened to us for once. We want peace and fairness, and a chance to show what we can do.”

Much of Kibera is in ruins now, blackened and charred and ash-blown. Toi market is a keening wall of tattered stalls, and Olympic surely has seen better days. Jane Anyango strides through it all like a phoenix, and the universe suspends judgment on Kenya, for a while.

*sister, Dholuo (c. 2008)

Wambui Mwangi is a writer and a scholar and lives in Nairobi and Toronto and is a member of Concerned Kenyan Writers

Peace Net

Peaceinkenya.net is an initiative under the Electoral Violence Response Initiative (EVRI-1)

How did EVRI-1 (every-one) start?

Following the outbreak of violence in Kenya on December 29th 2007, members of the Partnership for peace, hosted by PeaceNet convened and initiated an Electoral Violence Response Initiative (EVRI), consisting of civil society organizations (Maendeleo ya Wanawake, PEACENET TRUST, Amani Parliamentary Forum, and Nairobi Peace Initiative), The Kenya Private sector alliance (KEPSA), The Ministry Youth Affairs, The National Steering Committee on Peace building and Conflict Management. The Media Owners Association and the Media Council of Kenya. The team was joined by Action Aid, Oxfam, and World Vision. Since the initial meeting on the 29th December, a number of organizations have joined the initiative, including The Amani Counseling centre, Pamoja Trust, Youth Initiatives Kenya, Global Coalition against Poverty (GCAP), Saferworld

What does EVRI-1 do?

The Electoral Violence Response Initiative has begun to support and advise rapid peacebuilding initiatives particularly at the community level . These include: a white ribbon campaign, community level dialogue in Eldoret, Kasarani and Kibera, and is participating in the humanitarian initiatives of the Kenya Red Cross. PeaceNet regional committees in North Rift (Eldoret), Coast (Mombasa), Central Rift (Nakuru), Nyanza (Kisumu and Ugenya). Through the Media Council and the Media Owners Association, the participation of the media in peace building has grown phenomenally, as seen in the carrying of joint headlines by the Daily Nation and the Standard and the airing of National Prayers on all major broadcast media on Sunday January 6th January 2008.

Contact details

PeaceNet Kenya
Malim Juma Road, Off Denis Pritt Road
P.O. Box. 49806-00100 Nairobi, Kenya
Tel: (+254) 2725270/1
Mail: info @ peaceinkenya.net
web: www.peaceinkenya.net

An Unusual Hero

Mention the Kenyan GSU, and images of red-bereted, combat-geared policemen waving batons chasing rioting university students amid plumes of choking tear gas come to mind. It is not clear where the tagline fanya fujo uone (just try to make trouble, and see)came from, but it stuck so indelibly in the Kenyan psyche they might have well have adopted it officially and put it at the bottom of their logo. On 29th December 2007, Kenya saw a new side of this feared force when Superintendent Joseph Musyoka Nthenge faced a crowd of 500 angry demonstrators in Mathare and attempted to reason with them, asking why they were destroying a Kenya that had taken years to build. This was back before we knew what the fallout from the disputed and discredited presidential election would be. The electoral commission was delaying announcing the presidential results and people were getting restless. In slums all over Nairobi, young men gathered and prepared to march to the Kenyatta International Conference Center, ground zero for the Electoral Commission, to demand an answer.

The R Company of the GSU, Superintendent Nthenge’s unit, had been deployed to cover Kasarani constituency during the election. After the election R Company moved to Mathare. It is here that the TV cameras captured him talking to the demonstrators who had already destroyed property and were going to burn more houses and cars on their way to the city-center.

Fast forward to mid-February and we are driving to Ruiru to meet Superintendent Nthenge. Directions have been given as follows: past Ruiru town, past the fly-over, go two kilometers and you will see the camp on the left. We approach and from far we can see the rectangular metal water tanks raised high on stilts that mark many government facilities. Closer and we see the chain-link fencing and concrete posts that surround military camps, but we still miss the entrance and have to do a precarious loop before we get to the camp.

A brief pause at the gate while the guard makes a call and we are shown to the administration block.

This is the first surprise – he has an office and sits behind a desk. The second is the silver in his hair. On TV he looked like a young, battle-ready soldier. In person he is youthful but obviously a man of experience. He is medium-height and medium-build – not a man who would stand out in a crowd. He greets us warmly and gestures to the chairs opposite him. He is self-effacing and laughs off his newfound fame.

Superintendent Nthenge talks about that day in Mathare: “My duty was to make them not go to town… I talked to the boys in a calm way… First before you can disperse the rioters… you have to tell them your aim… There is no point of using force if they are willing to go.” But make no mistake, for all his gentleness you get the impression that Superintendent Nthenge will not hesitate to kick your ass if you cross the line he has drawn. “If they cannot disperse, you can use batons and teargas… and if that is not possible you have the third option of using the water cannon.”

After the results were announced, all hell broke loose. While the famous personalities were addressing the TV audiences from studios, Superintendent Nthenge was on the street. Though he looked calm, Superintendent Nthenge says, “I had to gather my courage. I said if they were going to stone me let them stone me.”

At a time when all TV channels were showing the GSU faithfully fulfilling every teargas-throwing, water-cannon spraying, slum-cordoning stereotype, Superintendent Nthenge’s clip playing over and over was like a palliative, giving the police a much-needed human face. While the riot police stood shoulder to shoulder in intimidating body armor, looking for all the world like space rangers, Superintendent Nthenge looked vulnerable and approachable. “Times have changed. If you cannot accept the change, it will force you,” Nthenge says. The GSU of old had a fearsome reputation, “If they would pass a place they would not spare anything, even dogs. They were not seen as people who could share a word with anybody,” Nthenge acknowledges and laughs. “The training has changed. I was taught negotiation and it sank into my brain… also customer care.”

“As in the people rioting are your customers?” I ask.

“Yeah… Why not?” Nthenge answers without a hint of irony. “People know their rights… People should not fear the GSU.” As to what should happen to make this tenuous peace in Kenya permanent, Nthenge says it is the duty of the politicians to go back to their constituencies and preach peace as rigorously as they campaigned to be elected.

The usual biodata: Superintendent Joseph Musyoka Nthenge was born on 18th March 1962 at Iviyani Village. He attended Kitengei Primary School from 1971 to 1977 and Kathese Secondary from 1979 to 1982. He joined the Kenya Police in 1983 and has followed no other vocation since. He went to the GSU training school and has served in various capacities, rising to his current rank of superintendent and Staff Officer of Operations of the R Company in 2007. Since he appeared on TV, colleagues from all over the country, some of whom he hasn’t seen since they trained together, have called to congratulate him for showing what they believe is the true image of the GSU. They and Superintendent Nthenge are true believers in the stated mission to make the Kenya Police a world class police force. At a time when we have also seen a riot policeman shoot dead a young unarmed man on TV, there is a reassuring professionalism and humanity about Superintendent Nthenge.

For all the stand-together, build-one-country, because-we-are-one-people talk, Superintendent Nthenge is a hero because he keeps his humanity about him and does not retreat to a safe, impenetrable place when he wears that camouflage and red beret.

Jacqueline Lebo lives in Nairobi, is a writer, photographer and the Managing Editor at Kass Magazine. She is currently working on a book about Kenyan athletes in the Rift Valley, and is a runner herself. Jacqueline Lebo is a member of Concerned Kenyan Writers and a photographic consultant for GenerationKenya.

A tale of two urban villages

South Loresho and Kibagare Village, in Nairobi, sit side by side. In a prefab room, with a single long table, and wobbly white plastic chairs, representatives of both communities also sit side by side. It is a microcosm of a Kenyan moment: someone from Eastern Province speaks and everyone listens. Then there is a parade through some of the other provinces: Western, North Eastern, Central. Although a good guesser may hazard by either their names or their faces exactly where they come from, there is a high chance that at least some of the guesses will be wrong. They speak using the national lingua franca, Kiswahili. They share common concerns – crime, security, employment, poverty.

Outside the room are houses with kei apple hedges. Cars, some ordinary saloon cars, others four-wheel drives with United Nations number plates, slow down to negotiate the speed bump just before the gate. This meeting is in the gated community of South Loresho. Most of the men at this meeting live outside the gates, in Kibagare Village, on patches of ground that slope away from a road so rutted that only the kerbs indicate that it once had pretensions to tarmac.

Contrast this: a patch of public land on which is perched a room four-foot by four-foot, with corrugated metal walls and corrugated metal roofs against a half acre of garden with a four-bedroomed bugalow and a neat sign outside with the house number on. The people who live in Kibagare Village are poor, there’s no doubt. And those who live in South Loresho are financially middle-class. It could have been a fine example of perfect tinder for class war, for resentment on the part of the poor, and fear of the part of the comfortable. Instead, these two communities, through a testing period of Kenya’s history, stayed peaceful.

They did as the pre-election posters advised: Chagua Amani, and they chose peace. Inequity in Kenya is most visible in the squalor of urban poverty, and it is a disadvantage few people will be able shake off. Yet this is what it seems the men of Kibagare Valley aspire to, and wish for themselves and their neighbours. They explain that the land they live on is not theirs. Years ago, the area was full of European-owned coffee estates. They needed workers, and those workers found a bit of hill to perch on. When the coffee estates were sold on, the workers found new kinds of work for people who had bought land in the new development. Many now work as gardeners, cooks, drivers, askaris (security guards). To them, this work is their livelihood and their eventual way out of poverty, if they hunker down and put their shoulders to it. Next door in Kangemi, another poor area, they say, they have their own title deeds, they can have easy money. Here, it is harder for us. If we don’t work, we don’t eat. That is why we decided that peace was better for us than politics. Although you can see that we come from all over Kenya, we did not fight. As one of the men says, “How could I turn against a neighbour who is also struggling and say, today I will burn your house?”

The villagers listened during the two pre-election sessions on community policing that the local police station had organised for them. In order to keep themselves safe, they set up a 50-person strong patrol unit who took it in turns to walk their community at night. When the committee heard that groups were wandering the country trying to stir up trouble, they decided they would let no outsiders in. They imposed a voluntary curfew by asking the area’s residents to stay in their homes as soon as evening fell. The chairman made his personal mobile number freely available so he could organise help whenever it was needed. “But we are all human, we are not perfect.” When there was trouble, the committee made sure the police knew about it. Miscreants were forwarded into the hands of the law.

It could have been so easy for the poor of Kibagare Village to loot the rich in South Loresho. “Poverty is something that drives people to only think about today, not the future. If you are hungry and someone pays you two hundred shillings to burn someone’s house you will do it.” Yet, the men of Kibagare Village chose for the future, not the today, and by doing so, they provide all of Kenya with a message of leadership by example. “If you tell people rules to keep all of you safe, you have to obey the rules yourself, even if you are a leader.”

What is the big secret for peace? Ongea, one of them says. Talk. Talk to your neighbours. Talk to people who live around you. Make connections. Find out who the leaders in neighbouring communities are and talk to them. Make your own networks. As a nation, we have a lot to learn from leaders like this. In a post-election Kenya, we find proud examples of leadership in a group of men in Kibagare Village. Men you can put your trust in, explain your concerns to and know you’ll be listened to.

There once was a Kenya where people chose to live where they would. There still are pockets of Kenya, where people choose to live as they will, irrespective of where their neighbours come from, and willing to live in peace. Chagua Amani: that is what they have done, in these two villages. Choose Peace.

Dayo Forster is a novelist whose first book, Reading the Ceiling, was published in 2007. She lives in Nairobi where she also works part-time as a financial sector development consultant. She is a member of Concerned Kenyan Writers.

Concerned Citizens for Peace

The concerned citizens for peace initiative came into being on January 1, 2008 after violence erupted in Kenya following claims of rigging and a flawed election process in the country. The original five core members- who included Kenyan peace mediators and members of the civil society- started the group in order to rally for peace and tolerance and to call for dialogue after the country witnessed its worst post-election violence that led to political and ethnic killings and the wanton destruction of property. The group wanted to see a Kenya without violence, a Kenya that is not divided on political or tribal lines. They wanted to see a peaceful Kenya, which had one people who were called Kenyan.

The original five core members included:

• Ambassador Bethuel Kiplagat- Kenyan renowned peace mediator and former special envoy for Somalia
• General Daniel Opande (Rtd) – Kenyan renowned Peacekeeper in Liberia
• General Lazaro Sumbeiywo (Rtd) – served as Kenya’s Special Envoy to the IGAD-led Sudanese peace process (1997-98) and then as mediator (2001-05)
• Ms. Dekha Ibrahim Abdi
• George Wachira- a policy advisor with NPI

The concerned citizens for peace initiative works in two levels:

1. Creation of a conducive peaceful environment
2. Encouraging dialogue on pertinent issues during the current crisis

For more information on the group contact:

Ms. Dekha Ibrahim Abdi: 0721 915 853
Mr. George Wachira: 0722 407 164
Shalini Gidoomal beadsandbush (@) mac.com

Administration: Shalini Gidoomal beadsandbush(@) mac.com>

Concerned Kenyan Writers

Concerned Kenyan Writers is a coalition whose purpose is to use writing skills to help save Kenya in this polarised time.

Contact person: Binyavanga Wainaina thebinj (@) yahoo.com
Administration: Daudi Were daudi.were (@) gmail.com
Website: Concerned Kenyan Writers

The Concerned Kenyan Writers coalition, convened by Kwani founder Binyavanga Wainaina, is supported by various individuals and organisations such as Generation Kenya KenyaUnlimited Kenyan Pundit Kwani Martin Kimani Mzalendo Potash Shailja Patel Story Moja Publishing Wambui Mwangi Daudi Were.

All writers are free to join and to submit texts. More information can be found on the Concerned Kenyan Writers webpage.

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