Last summer, five amazing students went on the first-ever ONE Campus Challenge trip to Africa, and it changed their lives.
Check out this video recap of their journey:
Stephanie, Steven, Melissa, Bryant and Tomas obviously had an incredible experience in Kenya. All from different schools in different states, they won their spots on the trip by completing “individual actions” and submitting projects about what they would do with their experience.
This year, we’re doing things a little differently. No more “individual actions”; instead, it’s all about getting your school in the top 20. Anyone who holds a titled position (e.g. Leader, Vice President, Treasurer etc.) at a top 20 school as of March will be eligible to submit an application for a spot on the trip, and the students with the 5 best applications will win. If you have any questions, go ahead and post them as comments on this entry and we’ll be sure to respond.
Last year’s trip was awesome, and we can’t wait for summer 2010.
Just as Congress has reconvened, it seems fitting that my first Political Science paper of the semester was on the relationship between climate change and poverty in developing countries. I have learned in the last few days that the drought and agricultural problems I and my fellow OCC Africa Trip students heard about in Kenya are not only worse than we thought they were; they also aren’t going to get better any time soon.
This March, Purdue University published a study by Noah Diffenbaugh, Thomas Hertel and Syud Amer Ahmed showing how climate change could increase poverty in developing countries. While the study focuses on urban workers, the basic premise can be used with just about any demographic: people living in poverty are going to be hardest hit by climate change if we don’t take action soon.
Diffenbaugh told the Purdue Communication and Marketing specialist, Elizabeth Gardner, that “extreme weather affects agricultural productivity and can raise the price of staple foods, such as grains, that are important to poor households in developing countries.” He also pointed out that “it is important to understand which socioeconomic groups and countries could see changes in poverty rates in order to make informed policy decisions.”
When our OCC group was in Kenya, we spent some time with the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), and one of the things I remember most is that Kenya has a huge agricultural market, but they are coming up against major obstacles — one of which happens to be the weather they are experiencing. Agricultural market or not, Kenyans can’t sell their products anywhere if they can’t even grow them.
While Kenya is going to be the country I reference most for a long time, it isn’t the only country running into these problems. Africans are only going to invest in seeds they know will grow in their area, but if the weather is poor all over the place, can they really know what will grow best?
Heat waves, droughts and floods cause agricultural problems and crop damages around the world, but most people in developed countries such as the United States and countries in the European Union are going to be at less of a loss if their crops can’t grow or are damaged because of the weather. In the fight against poverty, the promotion of better agricultural practices has to start somewhere, and it might as well start at the bottom — where the countries most in need exist.
5% of this year’s Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act devoted to helping poor countries adapt to climate change could begin to make that difference. If we can begin to make a difference, then countries like Kenya that want to be agriculturally strong, and have the potential, can begin to take the next step.
Tell your senator to invest in helping the world’s poorest people overcome the threats posed by climate change here. Your school automatically gets 500 points in the ONE Campus Challenge when you sign any ONE online petition.
-Melissa Boles Campus Outreach Ambassador for CA, ID, MT, NV, OR, WA
Last week I had a wonderful day at the ONE office in Washington, DC. We spent the day debriefing about our trip to Kenya. We talked about how to turn our experience in Kenya into activism. The day was full of staff briefings from ONE’s event planning, policy, and government relations teams. We then did interviews with the crew that is making a film about our trip.
I first started sharing my experience from Kenya on August 1, 2009, with the ONE Twin Cities group. This was a great way to communicate with people that have a good understanding of global poverty. Our members in Minnesota were concerned about how aid is being delivered and used on the ground. Many of them wanted to know where I will go from here with the information and my aspirations for the future. This experience has truly changed my life forever, and I will take this experience to truly make poverty history!
The Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) hosted us at the Kenya Agriculture Research Institute Center. At this location, they are creating hybrid varieties of sweet potato. Each variant is customized to produce a higher yield in different elevations, degrees of humidity, and climates. Many of these sweet potatoes are more successful because they have also been bred to be resistant to viruses and weevils.
The most common vitamin deficiencies in Kenya are Vitamin A, Zinc, and Iron, with more than 80% of people not receiving enough of these essential nutrients. Many of the institute’s sweet potatoes are being designed to include these nutrients. We learned that the orange coloring you come to expect in sweet potatoes is in less than 10% of Kenyan sweet potatoes, and it signifies the presence of beta carotene. Beta carotene is believed to strengthen your immune system, something that is very important for HIV patients.
The institute utilizes the feedback of farmers for their study on sweet potatoes in order to breed the most desirable plants. They have been promoting various ways that you can include sweet potatoes in local dishes, as a way to broaden the market. We were able to try sweet potato juice, cake, chips, and doughnuts. Surprisingly, they were not too bad. The price of these seeds has been subsidized in order to encourage farmers to cultivate them. Since the beginning of the study, yields have increased by over 40% and the nutritional value of sweet potatoes has significantly improved.
On Wednesday of our week in Kenya, the four other Campus Challenge students and I spent the entire day working with Tuungane Clinic’s outreach programs. They have been working hard in the region on their Voluntary Mobile Male Circumcision Campaign. The clinic had to get a lot of approvals from the district government to implement and promote their program.
Recent studies have shown that males who are circumcised are 60% less likely to contract heterosexually acquired HIV from their partner. They have trained many of their staff to council young men on the procedure, informing them on the importance of this in the prevention of HIV transmission.
Tuungane has their surgeons rotate to clinics in the district, performing hundreds of these procedures in a day. They have already circumcised over 15,000 males in the district since beginning in October. I was shocked that the locals were so willing to participate in the program. Dr. Omondi, from Tuungane Clinic, informed me that in many rural areas of Kenya it is a cultural tradition to circumcise males between 14-16 years old, as a way of inducting them into adulthood.
Tomas and Steven were even able to observe one of these procedures and speak with an individual that was about to be circumcised. One of their main operating rooms had three beds in it, because sometimes the program has so many patients that they have to perform three procedures simultaneously. This initiative by the Tuungane clinic, if continued to a large portion of the population, could significantly curb the prevalence of HIV in the area, an area where more than 1 and 10 people are HIV positive.
I visited Kibera, the largest slum in Africa, on our last day in Kenya. An estimated 1,000,000 people share 1 square mile of land. That’s about the size of Central Park in New York City.
We began our visit to Kibera at Carolina for Kibera, an NGO started by a University of North Carolina student in 2001. We met with staff and peer educators to hear about the various programs they offer to the people of Kibera. All of the programs sounded incredible, but the two that struck me most were the Youth Sports Program and Trash for Cash.
After the initial meeting, a few of us piled into the back of a pickup truck and huddled close to a few of Kibera’s youth to ride through the slum. Every 50 feet we drove, we were greeted by a new group of young people yelling “Mzungu, how are you?” (White person, how are you?). Our Kenyan driving partners found this quite funny and it just got more adorable every time for us.
Upon arriving at the first location, we were met by a large group of young Kibera residents, rakes in hand. This group was participating in the Trash is Cash program, which creates jobs for several youth groups that collect trash, recycling and composting what they can. For a while, we just watched. Young men were standing on both sides of a channel full of dirty water and trash. In perfect sync, they raked the trash down the seemingly never-ending stream.
As we stood on a narrow ledge watching, a man would walk by with two five-gallon buckets full of human feces for disposal. This, alone, was enough to make us gag. We didn’t have too much time to sit and watch because within minutes we were given rakes and joined the boys in the work.
I’m having a very difficult time describing this experience. Somehow, I found it one of the most beautiful of the trip. After only 20 minutes of raking, my limbs were on fire and my back was sore. I had pieces of sewage and trash all over my body. This was one of the most extraordinary situations I’d ever been in, and that is what made it so beautiful. What seemed so extraordinary and unbelievable to me was that this was the norm for these boys. They don’t know a world where you take your trash out every Sunday and wake up to an empty bin. Immersing myself in their world, only for 20 minutes, was powerful and emotional.
I would give anything to be back in Kibera right now, alongside young men who were never given the option of luxury. We see this scene as a display of incredible work ethic and resiliency — but to them, this is life.
During the OCC trip to Kenya last week, we took a break from the hot Kenyan sun with an unusual refreshment: sweet potato juice.
The juice was part of a sweet potato buffet that greeted us at the end of our visit with the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) and some of its Kenyan partners. The day started with a visit to a satellite center of the Kenya Agriculture Research Institute (KARI). The center has developed new varieties of sweet potatoes to be introduced in the central Rift Valley. The new variety is not only enriched with essential nutrients like Vitamin A, zinc and beta carotene, it’s also resistant to viruses and drought, has a shorter growing season, and a higher yield. In a year where drought has failed Kenya’s maize crop and an estimated 10 million Kenyans are in need of food aid, many farmers raising sweet potatoes have been able to keep their families fed.
The process to reach this point was a long and careful one that involved local farmers at every step. It was farmers in the central Rift Valley that identified sweet potatoes as the first crop to be improved. They felt that sweet potatoes could both enhance their food security and provide extra income if marketed properly to consumers. What they lacked was a type of sweet potato that could fight off viruses and weevils, and also provide key nutrients. With help from AGRA, KARI was able to cross different breeds of sweet potatoes to come up with a variety that met the farmers needs and would be appealing to eventual customers. Throughout the cross-breeding process, local farmers were brought in to vote on everything from color to taste to moistness.
Although the sweet potatoes have been thriving, their long-term impact has yet to be determined. One of the biggest challenges is for farmers to move beyond producing food for their families, marketing the potatoes so they can earn additional income. This is where the sweet potato juice comes in. AGRA and KARI are helping local farmers think through how to make their product attractive to the consumer and brainstorming opportunities to expand the sweet potato value chain: farmers can earn additional income by processing the potatoes into different products, and these enterprises could potentially employ other people in these rural areas.
This is the piece of the puzzle that is central to pulling people out of poverty not only in Kenya, but across Africa. With nearly two-thirds of Africans earning a livelihood from agriculture, projects like these are essential in unlocking the continent’s potential to feed itself and to increasing incomes, both of which help combat poverty. If paired with investments in infrastructure and assistance navigating developed-country markets, investments in crops that can flourish in Africa’s climate, smallholder farmer education, and the development of the agricultural value chain, could help farmers both access and become competitive in local, regional and international markets. In the end, what is simply a sweet potato for us in the United States is the key to a new and prosperous future for Kenyan farmers and their families.
To complete our packed final day in Kenya, we had dinner with an inspiring group of Kenyans: Imagine sitting at a table with some of your biggest heroes, with people who are able to create the change you want to see, with people who are international icons, and people who simply have great ideas, know how to implement them, and are doing just that.
This is the fantastic dinner we were able to have last Friday. We ate dinner with John Githongo—a former government official who was able to expose the corruption within the Kenyan government. We were also joined by Daudi Were, a Kenyan blogger who, along with fellow bloggers, contribute to this new era wherein the government must be wary that their citizens are ready and willing to keep them in check. Now, add their friends, a group of some 20 people who all have innovative approaches to the problems that they, everyday Africans, face.
I do not have the space to relate to all of you the amazing experience this was, but if you are interested in learning more, please comment or email any of us. We are ready and willing to relate the stories we were fortunate to hear.
I will leave you with one more comment on the amazing theme carried throughout my dinner-table discussion: the indomitable power of the human spirit. Every person I spoke to commented on how much the stories of others had affected them and how they were utilizing those stories in their current work, seeing them as the true currency of innovative development and of our age. And on their behalf, I ask that you, as Mr. Githongo, Ms. Yvonne Owuor, and Mr. John Primrose all advised: “Never stop questioning the world you live in.”
Imagine a world where you pick up a bouquet of Kenyan flowers alongside your morning latte once a week. This is the dream world for Peeush Mahajan, owner of Shalimar Farms, a farm that produces cut flowers, one of Kenya’s biggest exports.
Last week, we toured this magnificent farm, if you could call it that. This farm was much closer to a well oiled machine. While in the U.S. the costs and benefits of large factory farms are debated, in Kenya farms and factories like this one provide a very interesting model for development. Shalimar Farms is part of the East Africa Growers Association (EAG), a collection of farms that work together to achieve economies of scale that make it easier to market their goods.
At the flower farm we learned about barriers to trade for the flower producers. While the farm has been able to find a place for their flowers in some developed-country markers, it has struggled to find buyers in the U.S. The EAG works with an organization called COMPETE, which is funded through USAID and is affiliated with the East Africa Trade Hub. COMPETE and the trade hub help connect flower producers like Shalimar Farms with buyers in the developed world through trade shows and personal introductions.
We also had a chance to learn about a piece of U.S. legislation called the African Growth and Opportunity ACT (AGOA). AGOA works to provide African suppliers with a market in the United States by eliminating tariffs and quotas on Africa exports, thus allowing African exporters an equal playing field within the U.S. market. Unfortunately, some key goods that Africa produces are not covered under AGOA.
Sadly, Mr. Mahajan’s dream cannot come true so long as he lacks access to markets in the developed world for his products, and as such, he and his employees will see limited success without the opportunity to export their goods to the United States. This means that he will not be able to expand his amazing operation to more Kenyans, providing them with health care, food, housing, and education for their children.
I’ve never missed a location so much in my 21 years. I suppose it isn’t just the location, it is the people I met, the folks I was with, the things that I learned. I hadn’t even arrived home yet and I wanted to turn around and go back.
The last couple of days have been tough for me. Not only have I missed Kenya, I’ve been going through somewhat of an emotional rollercoaster. I received bad news when I got off the plane, and have dealt with other personal issues that had me feeling down. Yet, I hit my highs when I think about Kenya, and I can’t seem to stop grinning. I met such beautiful people and experienced such amazing things; I will never forget this trip.
I’ve got a lot of thinking to do, and not much time to do it in. How do I use the things that I learned and the stories that I heard to get others involved on my campus? How do I share my experiences without getting upset when people try to compare their trips abroad to mine? Will I ever be able to wrap my head around everything, or will the thoughts keep bouncing off the walls of my over-packed brain?
Our last day in Kenya was spent in Kibera, which was certainly an experience. The group split up, and I spent the day with Binti Pamoja, a women’s center for young girls in Kibera. They were putting together an event for the parents, so Nora and I helped them set up a bit for that, but mostly we just learned about the program and asked questions about Kibera. I talked with some girls about what it is like to live in Kibera (“You’re born in Kibera, you get married in Kibera, you die in Kibera”) and some of them talked with me about the 2007 election and the violence that occurred, which hit Kibera pretty hard. I heard about 2 and 5 year olds that were raped, girls too young to care for themselves that were having children, and bribes from the police that caused both young women and men to do things they never expected they would do.
It’s all I can do to keep myself in Vancouver right now. Certain things scare me; I’m a bit of a chicken when it comes to traveling and living in a place that is new to me, but I can feel myself finding the courage within to be someone that helps the women of the world find their potential and grow to be proud of themselves. It’s something I’m learning to do on my own, and there’s no better way to do something than while holding someone else’s hand. Even if that hand is on the other side of the world.
The OCC Blog is a daily log of the ONE Campus Challenge, a friendly competition to determine which university's student body has the most effective global poverty-fighting campaign. The site is operated by ONE staff, Campus Outreach Ambassadors (COAs), and Campus Leaders.
The content of each post represents the views of that post's author and does not necessarily reflect the views of ONE. ONE does not support or oppose any candidate for elected office, and any post expressing support or opposition for a candidate is not endorsed by ONE.
TAGS: 2009 OCC Africa Trip, Uncategorized