Education apparently is not enough

Yesterday was our first day of teaching. We have two sites, one in Kibera (which has often been referred to as the largest slum in East Africa, though apparently more recently, they’ve estimated that its size is perhaps one-third of earlier claims. It’s hard to do a census in a slum.) We’ve worked in Kibera before and we understand its rhythms, to the extent that a mizunga (white person) can do so.

Our second site is in a different slum at a different edge of Nairobi. This slum is called Mathare. Mathare may have recently overtaken Kibera in terms of size, from what I’ve been told. I accompanied the two UBC team members (both MBA students) who are working at Mathare so that I could get a sense of the conditions first hand, with class in session. It was interesting, and disheartening, at once. But it might also give a sense, for those of you who have made donations to the programs, of how money can be spent in these types of programs.

Our program provides three weeks of free education, with all the mentoring a student could want, all for the asking. We have sometimes been criticized for not charging a nominal fee for the program (say around $10-15), to add a level of seriousness and commitment to the program. We have resisted that suggestion to date.

Our program generally runs from 8:30-2:30, give or take. One of the first issues that arose at the Mathare site was “what language would be we using?” We had greeted each student as they arrived, watched as they kicked a soccer ball around, and played some ice-breaker games outside. Everything was comfortably communicated in English. We’ve always taught in English (Kenya, like Canada, is a “two official language country” with Kenya’s two languages being Kiswahili and English). This has never been an issue in the five previous years that we have been here.

In Mathare, it became an issue. There was a class ringleader who was clearly trying to stir everyone up. To what end, it was not clear, but it made for a rocky start. At first I thought perhaps his English was weaker than he’d like. Later, though, I was given an alternative hypothesis by one of our drivers. He noted that in Mathare, unlike in Kibera, there is far more peer pressure. Part of that peer pressure means that speaking in English is not appropriate (even if you can do so fluently, which, it turned out, most of the class can, so they must be practicing somewhere). If you are speaking in English (as a resident of Mathare) it means that you are showing off, and trying to let everyone know that you are better than everyone else.

Next question: how much were they going to be paid for taking our free three-week class? We told them “nothing,” but this did not set well. (We simply have never been able to raise enough money to consider this as a possibility.) We explained that we are here to teach, we are educators, not bankers or financers, and that education was what we provided. Not a stellar answer from their perspective, to be sure. Many NGOs do pay people here to go to training sessions. I think that is a bad model overall. Because then the focus is on showing up to get paid, not on learning. If people really don’t want the education, but bribery gets them into the classroom, is that really a good thing? I have yet to see a student learn when they didn’t want to learn, and I have a lot of experience in the classroom.

Next question: were we feeding them lunch? No. (Again, our fundraising simply does not support that kind of activity.) Without lunch, some said they didn’t want to stay beyond 12:30, even though for many of them there was nowhere else to go (unemployment among youth is a staggering 60%). In fact, with no lunch, they suggested that we just run a two-hour class, but they wanted the certificates that came with the program, even if they were only doing 20% of the work. We didn’t go for that either.

Next question: If they didn’t drink the tea and eat the mendazis (similar to donuts) we provided (something our fundraising does provide for, and for which we’re grateful to our donors), could they be given the equivalent in money instead? One student in particular had an issue with this because he’s Muslim, and yesterday was the start of Ramadan, the month of fasting (and fasting goes from sun-up to sun-down, which is why he couldn’t partake of our tea break). This would be about the equivalent of me going to your house for dinner, and after dinner you offered me dessert, and I wasn’t hungry, so I asked you if you could pay me, instead, the amount of money my dessert cost you to provide. We said we didn’t give “rebates.

It will be interesting to see how this site develops, who stays, and who goes. Particularly the ringleader.

The photos help illustrate the Mathare scene. The first is an aerial view of a section of Mathare (note the tin roofs, and tin buildings). The second is a view from our classroom door, looking out (soccer/football is big here, and we brought a soccer ball for recreational breaks). Finally, here is Julie, working with her breakout group.