Jack Makau

 

Jack Makau & Jane Weru

Support professionals • SDI Kenya & Akiba Mashinani Trust

Interview:  28 April 2016, Nairobi

Interviewer: Kate Lines

Original language: English


How Muungano first began collecting settlement data

Jack:

Data was always important for the federations. In the 1990s there were two studies – a study by Peter Ngau at the University of Nairobi and another study by a group called Matrix – and these studies said that there were lots of slum dwellers. They estimated that half the city were slum dwellers. And at the time there was no constituency called slum dwellers – slums were not recognised as a legitimate part of the city – and these studies helped catalyse the movement – they gave the movement some form, it made sense. 

But the movement used data that way – for advocacy, it was broad data. And then when Muungano got affiliated to SDI, round about 1999, SDI affiliates from South Africa and India came to Kenya and said there is a tool called enumerations. And Muungano took it up immediately. The reason was, it looked – as the millennium was changing – that there would be opportunities for communities to get land. They were speaking to the city. And for the professionals working with Muungano, and for Muungano, there was a bit of anxiety who in these settlements would get the land? If these opportunities came to pass, there was a need to establish who in the settlements would get land. And therefore when the Indians and the South Africans came with the tool and said, ‘Let’s try it’, it made a lot of sense for Muungano.

And the first place they tried it was in Huruma. And we were working with the City [authorities] in Huruma – we were having a dialogue for possible upgrade. And therefore we went straight ahead; even as the Indians were still here telling us about enumerations, we started to do them. It was a very rudimentary type of enumeration. We photocopied the forms at night, we learned in the field – but we counted.

At the same time, there was an urgent need in Korogocho settlement, where the president had come to the community and said, ‘Well, the land should go to the people’ – and there was a need to establish which people. 

Jane:

The Korogocho story has a lot to do with Father Alex. I think what happened, if I remember right, is that the structure owners in Korogocho had formed themselves into an association. And somehow they had managed to meet up with the president, and had persuaded the president – at that time Moi – to allocate the land of Korogocho to them. Now, on our side, and I think Father Alex especially, felt that if the structure owners were allocated land, many many people in Korogocho would be dispossessed. So we started talking, and it was felt that we needed to link up with the government, so that we can begin to influence the way the government handled slum upgrading. 

So at the time, Madoka was the minister in the president’s office in charge of, I think, home affairs. So we went to see Madoka with Father Alex, and Madoka then referred us to the provincial administrator (PC) for Nairobi. So we went to see the PC at the time – he was called Maina, PC Maina. So we spoke to him, and we agreed that it was important that we do an enumeration in Korogocho, so we can find out who actually lives there, before the allocations were made. 

So as a result of that, we reached out to the Indians, and it was agreed that we needed to go for an exchange visit to India, so that at least the government could begin to understand how exchanges and how enumerations were carried out. So an exchange visit was organized, and we went to India with the PC Maina and the director of planning at the time, who was called Kibinda, and myself. And after we had finished that visit, it was agreed that we would come back and we would begin to do enumerations with the assistance of the Indian federation. So that’s then how we started to do the enumerations in Korogocho.

Jack:

And that first enumeration really tested us, because it brought out the power of information. One, the community were not decided on who would get land, the tenants or the structure owners. And it was resisted: the collecting of names of the tenants was resisted very powerfully. And then we saw that this tool was really powerful. We worked with central government at the time to do the enumeration in Korogocho. We got a lot of support from other affiliates of SDI – Zimbabwe, South Africa, the Indians. We got the provincial commissioner of Nairobi and all the chiefs and all the district commissioners coming to Korogocho just to make sure this happened – that we could create a set of data that would be acceptable to the state for the allocation of land. The enumeration was resisted by owners of structures. They did not feel that it was in their interest to have tenants counted. 

And after that, we came back – we collected a huge amount of data, 18,000 households, I think 40,000 people at the time. And then we started struggling with how do we present this: do we give the government a list, what is the best way to do this? And that set us off on a journey that continues today, about how do you present data? Can it be verified? How accurate is it? We had to define things like what is a household. What constitutes a household? We struggled with issues like: a 15 year old that lives in a shack by themselves, next to his mother’s shack, and describes himself as an individual household – do we believe that? How do we define these things? So, in doing that, then we started to unravel the complexity of informal settlements. From the outside they look like a mass of housing. When you do enumerations then you start to learn a lot more about the settlements, the dynamics, the relationships, the community, and so on. But that is where we started.


 

Jack Makau

Support professional • SDI Kenya

Interview:  28 April 2016, Nairobi

Interviewer: Kate Lines

Original language: English


A story about forms and a match

In 2005, we started to work with the UN and Cities Alliance and they asked us to do a city-wide enumeration – and this is the first city-wide enumeration we had done – in the city of Kisumu. We got a team of university students: an entire class. I moved to Kisumu, together with Laurence [Apiyo] who was a good organizer, and the chairman of Muungano – or the chairman-to-be of Muungano – called Benson Osumba. 

I remember we started off doing the enumeration and we had a big community team – about 300 people, from all the settlements in Kisumu, doing enumerations. But one challenge that we had is that the funds for the enumeration had not come; but we had teams on the ground collecting information. We’d call the office and the office would say ‘not yet’ – I think processes of multilateral organizations take time – but we kept the momentum. The community was getting frustrated, and one day I think we misjudged how frustrated people were. I think we’d been enumerating for two or three weeks, and then one day we came to the office – the resource centre – and there were lots of people. We wondered, what are these people doing? It was part of the enumeration team, maybe 200 people, and they were fed up with us. They said, ‘You have to give us our money today’. We gave them the same story: ‘Let us call Nairobi’; we called Nairobi ¬– Nairobi said ‘not yet’. So some of them went into the resource centre and took out all forms that we had enumerated – maybe half of Kisumu by this time, 20,000 forms – and they stacked them outside and said they were going to burn them. 

And it was a bit of a scary moment, because it seemed after they burned them then they would turn on us. It was very animated, people were very upset, voices were loud. And they stacked them up and then they said ‘Call Nairobi and ask them if the money’s coming this afternoon’. We made a bit of a show about it, and then someone said ‘Give me a match, I’m going to set the forms on fire’. And somehow a matchbox was found. 

At that point one of the team – Henry from Korogocho – said, ‘We don’t have enough airtime on our phones, let me just get some airtime so we can call Nairobi’ ¬– which was his moment to disappear. But as he disappeared, a small team was sent after him; so he could see people following him – so he ran off and went to the police station and he told them could they please lock him up, because there were people who wanted to beat him up. And the police had real difficulty, saying, ‘No we can’t lock you up for nothing, tell us have you done something?’ ‘No I’ve not done anything’. But he eventually persuaded them to lock him up. So that one got away. 

The rest of us, we were there with the bonfire – with the forms and a match. And the guy who came to light the match, lit the match and went for the forms. And then Benson, out of nowhere, decided to punch the guy. And Benson was big and strong – ex policeman. He punched the guy. And I knew: okay, now we are dead. Because the guy went flying (so he didn’t light the forms). And I knew: now we are finished. And you know, in all that, one of the ladies she kind of stepped up – it was a little moment – and she just said ‘Stop, stop. I think these guys are telling the truth – they’re even beating us up to save our own data. What are we doing?’ And the crowd changed; the mood changed. There was a bit of heckling, but a lot of people kind of got the message. It was a very special moment. And slowly, the conversation turned to, ‘Okay, so when do you think you’ll get funds to pay us?’ And the crowd faded. So it was a very special moment: I think a bit of a milestone in Osumba getting the confidence to be chairman, and the status and the recognition. 


 

Jack Makau

Support professional • SDI Kenya

Interview:  28 April 2016, Nairobi

Interviewer: Kate Lines

Original language: English


A story about cutlery and learning exchange

It was early days: we were cutting our teeth with enumerations, so we built a local team of enumerators and one of the team members was [Monika], a really strong activist lady from a settlement called Githarani in Nairobi. She had really fought for land. She was elderly – she was probably in her 60s – and she could be quite cantankerous even in normal interactions, but she was a member of the team. She couldn’t read or write, so what she did in the team is that she carried all the material: the pencils, the rubbers, the sharpeners, and the forms. It was great to have her because if an enumerator got a pencil she would remember, and you’d not get another one until it was sharpened to the end. And at the end of the day she collected all the materials. So she was an asset to the team. 

And then we got invited for an exchange visit to South Africa. There was an enumeration happening in a place called Katlehong, near Johannesburg – and it was proposed that I go with Monika and another young man in the team called Chalo, from Korogocho. And so we prepared, and the day came, and we went to the airport and we got onto a plane. I knew it was the first time for Chalo and Monika to fly. It was a British Airways plane, and they put us all on three seats together, but they put Monika on the aisle seat, me at the centre, and Chalo at the window seat. We should have changed it ourselves, but I didn’t know that Monika would be so scared of flying. And so, the plane taxied and started taking off – you know the angle where it is gaining height. I’m not sure how she removed her seatbelt but all of a sudden she was screaming: she didn’t have a seatbelt, she got up, she started running, she was falling, the whole plane was laughing. I had to remove my seatbelt and go for her; one of the cabin crew was helping me and laughing as well with everyone else. So we got her back to the seat and put her in the middle seat. (I don’t think I get embarrassed after that, in any situation.) 

And then as we flew she got a bit more comfortable and chatty, and then after meals were served she asked me, ‘So, this cutlery’s plastic and the plates are plastic – so what happens when the plane lands? Do they wash them?’ And I said, no they just throw them away. So she was excited and asked me, ‘so could they give them to me?’ And I said, yeah we can ask. And when the plane landed we asked the cabin crew whether we could have the big bags where they empty all the used cutlery. Of course they had a good laugh and said yeah, go ahead. And for good measure they said would you also like the old newspapers. So we left the plane, each of us I think with two bags and stacks of newspaper under our arms. 

So we started driving towards Katlehong and then, as we drove, at some point we were going past a police station and Monika says, ‘Stop, stop’. So the driver stops and then she gets out of the car – so we all get out of the car – and then she looks across and there’s a police station. And then she asked the driver, ‘This is the place where they killed Steve Biko?’ When we got back in to the car, I asked Monika, it’s your first time in South Africa, how did you pick a random police station? And she said, ‘In 1973 when he was killed I saw it in a newspaper and I cut it out’ – she couldn’t read – ‘so I cut out the picture and I kept it, and it is the same place’. And for me I understood that her struggle for land was a much deeper struggle – she was illiterate but her struggle was connected with many things. It was a very deep, deep struggle. A lot of respect – not many people connect their struggles in that particular way.

So we got to the place – the settlement where we were going to do enumeration – and they didn’t put us up in a hotel, they put us up in upgraded houses, with slum families whose houses had been upgraded. And the first house that we went to, as we put down our things Chalo started talking to the daughter in the house – young, pretty girl – and they decided to take a walk. It was early evening and they just went. And first it was a bit uncomfortable – we had introductions then we sat in the sitting room. I think the mum in the house was cooking; the dad, we tried some small talk, but he was a bit worried, so he asked, ‘So this young man you came with, you know him very well?’ I said yeah, he’s in the federation. Then he let it go, then after some time he got a bit agitated. He said something like, is it normal in Kenya for you people to do this? Then he was getting very agitated, and even I was getting agitated. Chalo has not been anywhere out of Kenya and he’s gone off with someone’s daughter. And at nine they strolled in. 

So the next day after breakfast when the SDI car came to pick us, we were asked to leave with our bags. They were very nice, they said we will take you to another house. So we went for the enumeration and then eventually we ended up in the other house, with our bags and our bags of cutlery and garbage. So that evening, Monika washed all the cutlery, and she arranged it very well and asked for a little box. And it fitted in the box, and then we tied the newspapers so she had a little bundle – the 6 bags had condensed. Some people had not eaten their peanuts, so she kept those aside. 

Then – and its very regular in Kenya that a lot of Kenyans take herbal supplements or medicines, and normally they’re in very raw form so you just get a stem of something or some leaves, and you boil them or you crush them and then you eat them. But it’s different in South Africa. So Monika had some herbal things, so she asked for a pan and then she started cooking roots and stems. And I was in the sitting room, and then the mum of the house was screaming and saying we are bewitching her house, and there were neighbours, commotion. Some brave lad from the settlement came and grabbed the pan in a blanket and then ran off with it and threw it somewhere – it was so dramatic. And, of course, then the next morning when they came to pick us, they told us to go with our bags. That was part of how we learned enumerations. We still learnt a bit about enumerations.

When we got back home Chalo decided that he can’t go back to his settlement, Korogocho. Because if you come from a foreign country that night your house would get broken into, because you must have come with good things so someone will come and take those good things. So Chalo went to stay with Monika, until Monika kicked him out one week later. She was brilliant. She was a real asset.


 

Jack Makau

Support professional • SDI Kenya

Interview:  28 April 2016, Nairobi

Interviewer: Kate Lines

Original language: English


How Muungano's peer to peer learning exchanges evolved

Jack Makau: how Muungano’s peer-to-peer learning exchanges evolved

Peer to peer exchanges have always been very important to Muungano for reasons of learning, but more so for the building of leadership. And exchange visits were very important that way. But then as we went into the new millennium then there were learning visits – people went and learned how to do enumerations and came back with a bit more confidence. Between 2000 and maybe 2002 there were a number of exchanges that helped develop the tools, the rituals – savings, enumerations, house modelling and planning – and a lot of skills were built on exchanges. 

I think the most significant series of exchanges started to happen in 2003. We were a fairly young affiliate of SDI, and SDI came and said, we're building a new federation in Uganda and we want you to go and help the Ugandans become a federation. And it was a brilliant opportunity for Kenya. We built a lot of leadership in trying to build Uganda. Between 2003 and 2005 there was always a Kenyan team within Uganda – they tried organising different types of organising, different techniques, and they learned.

And it was also a place for reflection. I remember going with a community leader from Huruma who was very resistant to tenants participating in slum upgrading, but when we went to Uganda he now started playing the role we were playing – he started trying to tell the Ugandan federations why they needed to have tenants participate. So I think it was a place for reflection for him: he reflected on the message he had to deliver and in time he understood and there were benefits to his settlement – they now could go beyond that conflict of structure owners and tenants. So Uganda was extremely informative and useful in our formation. It was a bit of a stepping stone.

And as we were doing these things, and carrying on with the local programme, the circumstances pushed us to reflect deeply on the tools – on savings, on enumerations. We were struggling with savings – every savings group was losing money – so we were forced to reflect. What do we do, how do we change this? So we reflected. We reflected around enumerations, because the needs were there. But out of those reflections and the activities that we were doing the Kenyans became very good teachers. And now the federation, instead of always going to learn, now became a federation that went to teach and help other groups. So they went to Ghana, they went to start off the federation in Sierra Leone, and they kept on going, teaching, and especially on enumerations.

The methodology on enumerations had been refined, we were playing around with what to do with our savings, we had figured out how to stop losing savings – by 2006 no groups were reporting any lost money. So something had changed. We had learned something.

We learned that we don't build a system based on trust; you build a system that people can trust. And therefore we spent quite a bit of investment in strengthening the system. The federation developed a team, and every group had a representative from that team, and there were network representatives and there were city representatives – of auditors. And every group was getting an audit, a social audit. So we didn't leave things to chance. We said, we are neighbours, we save together, but if we just say 'it's based on the goodness of my heart', when I have a challenge and I'm a treasurer, and I have a big family challenge, what do I do? I take a little bit, and then I can't pay back, and then it breaks the group. So we strengthened just to ensure that if you took today, tomorrow you'd be discovered – so the taking could not happen. So it strengthened Muungano and then Muungano when to teach, went to many countries. And the interaction continued that way until 2009, 2010, when SDI started building around the ideas of having hubs – and they had an East African hub, which was Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, sort of saying, instead of always seeking support from faraway places can federations in neighbouring countries start to build a network, a closer relationship? Can the federation leaders in Kenya be able to support the ones in Uganda and vice versa, and Tanzania, and so on. And so the hub started to be built, and when we went to the hub a bit of our feeling bigger than others was checked. We had to recognise that the other federations had grown – Uganda had grown tremendously up to the point in 2014 when Uganda was made the learning centre for East Africa. Kenya had … I think there was a bit of envy, but there was also a recognition that things are not static, that you don't become a teacher forever – that you need to sustain that momentum. And therefore there's a healthy competition that still exists between Muungano and other neighbouring federations – and federations generally – but this is a healthy competition that spurs on the federation and gives them cause to think and reflect on their next growth path. 


 

Joseph Kimani & Jack Makau

Support professionals • SDI Kenya

Interview:  28 April 2016, Nairobi

Interviewer: Kate Lines

Original language: English


The evolution of Mwamko wa Vijana, the Muungano youth federation

Kim:

As enumerations were going on, we started observing a trend. And this was the other thing about the data collection. I think the data in Dagoretti had taken 3 years for us to return, and when we went back, we observed … In Dagoretti the settlements that were in Mutweni, one settlement called Kaburi is actually a graveyard – so the structures are very close to the graveyard, so you can see people burying. So one time we passed there, and you know you look at the graves and you look at the people that have just been buried recently ­– you can tell by the dates indicated there. But then we also looked at the age of most of the people that had been buried and we observed they were young people. A lot of them were young people. And we started asking, what's happening? What's killing all these people, the young ones?

So that question started disturbing us in a way. In Huruma, again, we kept on recalling how difficult sometimes the process [is] even for us as community organizers, entering the community and sometimes getting the feeling of insecurity. As you go to facilitate a meeting – a savings meeting in Mahera or in Redeemed or in Kambi Moto – you would require the support of the federation, to escort you to the meeting and get you out of the meeting.

So in a sense the whole issue of young people came to us: there's a constituency here – as much as we talk about savings – that need be approached or we need to reach out to. I remember the conversation between Jane, Jack and myself and they kept on asking, ‘what is it that you think can be done?’

Jack:

I remember doing enumerations in Dagoretti with Kimani and then coming back to return the data to the community – I think a week after, we processed it very fast and then one week after we came back to return the information. And when we returned the information, three young people had passed. And we asked people, 'how come three young people? And they told us one had died of HIV/AIDS, one had been shot, and one had committed suicide. And then the more we looked at our enumeration data, we realised the youth and the children were 60 per cent of slum dwellers. So there was that need.

Kim:

It took a bit of time, really to make the youth agenda an agenda to be considered amongst these important other issues that the federation and the institution was dealing with at that time. And what came out immediately was, okay, if we approach the youth where they were do you think we will be able to make any impact in changing their lives? And the question of mentorship came to be. So the idea was developed by Biden, and us we were interesting in putting the model in practice somewhere in Huruma, in Mathare. Kambi Moto was the first ground to test out the mentorship programme – the new dawn, [it] translated to Mwamko, new dawn, new nascent, new beginning.

Basically what we had in mind was how do we get some of the youths who were already interested maybe in doing something positive in the settlement to journey with the children and transform their lives. And of course the programme evolved. It started, and the activities for us that were coming, informed by the young people, that would resonate well were things to do with sports, culture, the mentorship programme itself, and a solid one that would connect them with the rest of the settlement was waste management. The whole mentorship programme was to be linked with the organizing. And it was a question of how do we get children to participate? And the idea of involving children was to cut the generation of those going to join drugs, those going to join crime. Because we knew those who were recruiting – the gangs – were moving very fast as well. So we kept on brainstorming and sharing with the mentors and saying, are we catching up really? Who is keeping the children busy? So the children were to be kept busy during school holidays through sports and cultural activities. And how the Mwamko organized these were through festivals. So at, say, Korogocho area – which was a ward by itself – going to each village and each village ensuring they had a sports tournament that brings every child into the tournament, and a cultural event so that those who do not fall into sports can use the cultural event as their space. And of course during the holidays these mentors who were seniors would help them in education. And every year they would pick a theme – the first theme was ‘education is a right’ – and that theme was internalized through sports, would be internalized through drama, and their art pieces would be used to bring out the themes. At the weekend the idea is to occupy, to keep this child busy – if you let them loose, the vampire will grab them, the vampire will take that. So the idea was not to let go of that space. So they would rehearse and then the first term of the school holiday, which would come around April, they would do the inter-villages competition; second term, it would be a central, settlement-based competition; and third term the inter-settlements would meet – so Korogocho would meet Kahawa Soweto, like that. And the football was inter-villages, then inter-settlement, and then inter-constituency. And now we have the Kenya Harambee star – a professional player called Ayub – he played, we have newspaper cuttings, he played in the Mwamko and scored 13 goals against Soweto!

The whole idea was to create a community, so that with each activity you are building space for someone. So the other youth now, who were now the senior – though our focus was more of helping the children, but you are also dealing with a group that is already there – so this other group wanted something to engage them, it being difficult to start savings with them. They struggled with the savings: they borrowed money though they never [re]paid, they had challenges of governance and … it's the youth thing, you know. For us what was important was keeping them there, not out there. So it moved. 

Jack:

One thing we wanted to do with Mwamko, with the children’s movement, is that we said we wanted to build local philanthropy around it. Our other programmes were built around grant financing from North-based organization and we said, let’s see if a corporate social responsibility and other people, local people, would support the children’s movement and the youth movement. And we had many volunteers who came to give talks – mentors – and one of them happened to be a marketing manager in the Nation Media Group. And he was a marketing manager for the Swahili paper, Taifa Leo. And he came and he was fascinated by all this young energy and he said, you know what, I want to write this story in Taifa. And he went off and he wrote the story. And then he realised there were many stories so he came back and said, can your young people write stories and I'll publish them in the paper? And he gave us a column. And some people started to write. So we had a cadre – we must have begun with about 20 young writers – all writing in Swahili about their settlements and getting published in a national paper. Which was good. But the Nation Media Group wanted to get involved more and then they became the sponsors for the football tournament. And that year we had a tournament where, I remember, 544 children participated. And they bought all the uniforms, they bought balls, they bought trophies, goal posts. So it was a very good partnership. And it was very fulfilling for them: they had these matches in the sports pages of the paper. So they wanted to get involved even more, so they said, okay with the older ones can they become newspaper vendors? And then we looked for ... we didn't look, there was a lot of young blood floating around. We got youths to learn how to be vendors. And they got an incentive to get the first batch of newspapers free and then thereafter that they would have started a vending business. The Swahili paper was also struggling with circulation so this worked for the paper as well. And they said, the people who would read the Swahili paper are mostly in the slums, but the vendors don't go to the slums, so let's get slum youth. Of course there were challenges like distribution – the distribution vans didn't want to go into settlements because the paper is circulated at 4am and they said, we'll get mugged. So we had the youth waiting for papers on highways as 4am. Some of them did very well; some not so well. But I think a number of them became and still continue to be big newspaper vendors. I think there was one guy in Mathare and one guy in Pumwani. So that relationship was a bit fulfilling.

Kim:

Now, the children mentorship programme evolved to a children council. We looked at [UN] Habitat – at that time was struggling with the city council of Nairobi to come up with a model, a children council model in the city. And we challenged it, because the children who were involved in putting up a children council were children from the middle class. So we said, no, let's create a model with the opportunity we have. So through the mentorship programme, I remember a meeting that was held, and it was an election, and a child was elected the first mayor of the city – the first child mayor. The whole idea was to build the children council to become now the space for also them participating in governance issues. So they would have departments of education, child rights, something to do with the health, something to do with the environment…

Jack:

I think it was a good idea … even before the model was developed. And then there was the convergence the with Biden challenging us to start mentoring, that there is an important constituency that we were not seeing. But that constituency was being seen by the UN and the city. I think the initial children representatives at the UN, if you looked at the names they looked like the names of the country's cabinet – the children of people in high positions. And then there was this election, so we thought to ourselves, how are we going to do this? And we figured if we get many, many children from the slums on election day to the venue, we could make up for the resources we didn't have. For every elected position, when a child from the slums stood up they got more votes than anyone else. And it followed that the junior mayor came from the slums. It was a big success to have a slum child sitting in the next office to the mayor. 

Kim:

What happened? Is that the Mwamko evolved. The group that we captured in the mentorship programme were able to go to where Mwamko expected them to go – because the whole idea was for them to be converted through the process, and they themselves to become now mentors and continue. And we've heard good stories – stories of change – by individuals. You go to Huruma, you find Johnte; you go to Mathare, you find Kaka; you go to Korogocho, you find Thuo; you go to South Kiambiu – Nairobi Eastleigh South – and you find chief Florence. Now she's a chief, and she was a protegee of the programme.

Jack:

You know, the youth movement is different from Muungano, because what happens is that you invest a lot in young people, 16 to 20, but then they're moving on in life. And then all that investment one day goes. You go and look for this young guy and he's found a job, or he's gone for training. It's good that he's on the right path, but you start to rebuild again. And every few years you rebuild again, and then those skills move on, and then you rebuild again. So that is a big difference with Muungano.

Kim:

In 2010, the transition of the federation from Pamoja Trust, that really affected a lot the momentum that was building for the youth federation. Because at that time it was even struggling now to give itself a structure. I remember Nakuru now was on board, Mombasa was on board, Kisumu was on board; it had even taken now almost a similar structure as the national federation. And they were negotiating even for space and resources within the federation. So it's only that now with that transition, the federation had a bit of its internal consolidation and internal issues which it had to first focus on. And the youth again wasn't so much of a priority at that time, to now. I think this is the time when now the federation again is coming back to soberness, to realising, actually, we are surrounded by youth, and the question has not been ‘involving the youth’ ­– it's how do we involve, what model will work best for these? So I guess it's the question of that transition – but the need is still there. The need is still there. I think the federation has an opportunity to use now the young members, the young women, the young men that were in the movement, to continue going back to build generations within a programme.