Kenya is steadily moving towards the full realisation of child rights but there continues to be substantial disparities across the country. While there has been progress in school enrolment, child survival and a reduction in female genital mutilation there are still challenges in gender equality, public participation and access to essential services. The 2010 constitution and related policies make provisions for entitlement to services and participation however, there have been weaknesses in the implementation of these legal and policy frameworks.
During the lead up to the Kenyan national elections in 2017 children across Kenya took part in a children’s charter calling for their voices to be heard in the governance agenda. Over 40,000 children from all social backgrounds expressed their concerns on the Government’s development plans following coordinated and sustained mobilisation over a seven-month period. The result has been an increase in agency with more children embracing their role in making change happen; an activated youth network campaigning on a range of similar issues and commitments from local government leaders.
The children’s charter represents the socio-political concerns and aspirations of young Kenyan children across the country. It started with a postcard campaign across schools, communities and county assemblies, where face-to-face meetings were held with children to discuss the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) framework and its importance to local and national development plans. Children were then asked to reflect on their own circumstances, the issues that concerned them and what action they would like to see from Kenyan leaders.
The postcard data was collected, analysed and further discussed with children. Many believed that the Government’s provision of free primary education was a significant achievement, they also felt proud to be citizens and wanted a peaceful environment to grow up in. The concerns emerging from children were violence and the continued barriers to education, peace and food security.
Based on these results representative groups of children[1] drafted local charters with recommendations for county development plans. With the support of partners, children were able to hand over and discuss the recommendations with local politicians, this was a significant achievement at the time given the political attention on the re-election process unfolding in the country.
The local charters were then consolidated into a national Kenyan Children’s Charter which was launched on Universal Children’s Day in 2017 by child representatives from each county.
At the time the charter was presented, decision makers showed interest in the recommendations with some making explicit commitments to address concerns raised. There is evidence that some draft development plans are capturing issues raised and in Bungoma County a rescue centre has been constructed as a result of the consultation.
Furthermore, some of the children have now become involved in child-consultations on amendments to the Children’s Act calling for provisions to involve children in public participation processes.
The Kenyan Constitution and legal framework place a strong emphasis on public participation in decision-making. When presenting the children’s charter, children explained that if they represent more than 50% of the Kenyan population and are not being consulted, then the law is not being properly implemented. They asked for the creation of spaces for child participation so they can systematically be part of the decision-making process.
During the seven-month mobilisation period there was a deliberate effort to ensure the most excluded children in all countries were represented in this process. Approaches included working with sports associations, utilising popular moments (such as the Day of the African Child), and an emphasis on the leadership of children’s networks and local agencies. With greater representation across counties strong partnerships allowed us to reach a higher and more diverse number of children[2]. Partners included Child Fund, Mtoto News, World Vision, Mathare Youth Sports Association, Moving the Goal Post football and Save the Children.
The initiative is one of largest public actions in the global south within Save the Children, with significant learning for future ambitions to ensure children are supported to have a voice within civil society. The opinions gathered by children have helped Save the Children to further clarify its focus in Kenya within its next strategic plan.
For many participating children the charter hand over represents the first opportunity for them to engage with decision makers. We have observed an increase in self-confidence among young people along with more interest from decision makers and the media.
Partnership, transparency and pooled resources have been important principles underlying the project, creating joint ownership and trust.
Lastly, the simplicity of the postcard tool for surveying the views of children encouraged high numbers of participants. It allowed children from eight to eighteen to express their concerns and recommendations in a simple way that was easy to disseminate across the country.
As time passes we will start to see the full impact of this approach, but for this to happen children and partners will need to be involved in monitoring and accountability of political promises. The partners in the project will be supporting children to monitor commitments and implementation and continue to utilise the charter and popular platforms.
[1] Children are elected in each county to represent their peers and they meet quarterly to discuss concerns and issues raised by their constituencies.
[2] Children’s networks lead on the framing of priorities and presentation to decision makers; child focused agencies facilitated the participation of children; media agencies ensured there was visibility and wider public engagement; a wider network of supporting agencies (schools, youth clubs, business etc) supported the logistics and coordination of the process.
Regional Advocacy and Campaigns Coordinator
Grace Nyoro works as the Regional Advocacy and Campaigns Coordinator, East & Southern Africa Region at Save the Children. Grace works with 12 countries in their region on the campaign to End Child Marriage and for increased public resources to ensure access to essential basic services for children in the region.
Project Manager
Maria worked in international development for 5 years, monitoring and evaluating the impact of child rights campaigns for WorldVision and Save the Children. She is now in Portugal working at WeChangers, a start-up company developing an online platform that connects social purpose organisations and funders, where she is responsible for impact measurement.
This blog is republished with thanks to the authour, it first appeared on Alix’s Medium blog, which you can find here
The digital world is disorienting. It permeates every aspect of our lives, but few of us understand how it works. Worse yet, few of us know where to begin if we want to make it work for us. We are discouraged from asking questions when something feels icky or confusing. If you don’t get it, you’re the problem. The technology is magic, and so are the people that build it. Because — in a slight tweak to Clarke’s third law — any technology sufficiently distanced from our own conceptual understanding is indistinguishable from magic.
What would it take to build the right types of knowledge so everyone can demystify, navigate and leverage the digital world for their purposes? For the past decade or so, there have been two dominant answers to that question:
But we know that neither of these answers gets to the heart of the question.
Over the past decade, I’ve worked with activists interested in strategically adopting technology. And even groups with the most resources, clearest political beliefs and noblest aims struggle to build the right types of knowledge to do it well. It is very difficult — sometimes impossible — to act in your own best interests and in line with your politics and preferences when choosing, managing, and using technology. And while I have long been convinced that one-off trainings on hard skills are a dead end, it was only in the past few years that I have worked to explicitly target a type of knowledge I call technical intuition.
I didn’t want our organisational partners to learn to code, I wanted them to learn how to talk to developers. I didn’t want them to outsource complexity, I wanted them to learn what skills they need in-house, which they could contract out, and how that might change over time. I wanted them to become inventive with technologies that they couldn’t necessarily deploy themselves, but could understand enough and in the right ways to articulate exciting new possibilities. I wanted them to ask incisive questions about underlying data that technologies cast off. I wanted them to actively and regularly wrestle with the challenges data use might present and the decisions they would need to make to use it responsibly.
We have looked for ways of unlocking technology careers for those interested in seeking more sustainable financial futures (throw a rock and you’ll hit a boot camp). But what about those who do not want to learn to code, but still want to make meaningful choices about technology? We are faced not just with a pipeline problem but also with a pedagogical one.
The more I have seen technical intuition in action, the more I am convinced that it is a critical form of knowledge (not simply a skill set), and one that we as a society have not sufficiently explored or optimised for.
Technical intuition is a foundation for agency in and about the digital world and a missing cornerstone of the solution to many of our techno political challenges.
Currently, broad public participation in the decisions we make about our digital future is impossible. Asymmetric access to knowledge, power, infrastructure, and resources that drive the creation of digital spaces is driving inequality. Political, economic, and social inequality. And — as we do with most retraining efforts when economies undergo major transformation — we oversimplify the skills needed to broaden participation and access. We focus on narrow hard skills. But the acquisition of narrow hard skills like coding will re-entrench existing economic relationships rather than reshape them.
Before that happens, I suggest that we rethink what capacities we should be working towards for proactive participation and engagement in politics and new economies.
Technical intuition is a conceptual frame that we know and see but have never worked towards. It is a key to broad-based access to personalised decision-making within and about technical systems.
An imagination equipped with the information and instincts to conceptualise (good and bad) and suggest (good) technical systems even without the skills of implementing the ideas
An ability to formulate questions that can drive understanding and decision-making, and a clarity on how and where (to what experts) you would need to direct those questions
A clarity of how your politics and preferences (both personal and professional) connect to the decisions you can and should make about — and within — digital systems
An animated impulse of when to be opinionated, active, and targeted if a system is designed in ways that do not align with our politics and morality
There are many examples and situations that we experience daily in which technical intuition can support more agency and decision-making. When we are at work and considering innovative ways that technology could help us accomplish our goals, when we’re making decisions about how to engage online. But technical intuition comes to play even when we are out shopping for groceries.
I’ll use a consumer example that is nearly universal: my grocery store suggests that I sign up for a discount card that I scan at checkout in exchange for a reduction in the cost of my groceries.
How does technical intuition function in this situation?
Does the initiative offer any detail on how the data might be used? Does it connect with schemes at other companies? How much in savings do I get? Do I want to participate and therefore incentivise this company to carry out this initiative? Are those savings worth the exchange to me personally? Is it worth it to my family? Will this one day be required? What effect would that have?
I won’t sign up for a card because I don’t think the data I am exchanging for the cost savings is sufficient enough to warrant it. Or, I will sign up, because I think the 10% reduction in cost is worth the likely surveillance — and I may struggle to pay for my groceries otherwise. If that is the case, maybe I will sign up, and will include fake contact details and swap cards with friends occasionally to muck up the data being collected about me.
After reflecting on this initiative, I am surprised to learn that there aren’t regulations in place about the sale of data generated through it and that the store didn’t attempt to clearly explain to me what the trade offs were for signing up. If it’s an issue that really gets me mad, I follow up in a feedback form, I raise it with friends and family and I raise it with staff at my local branch. I recognise I may have less leverage with companies than I do with say, government initiatives, but I know that most of the gaps in consumer protection exist because customers don’t have sufficient interest and technical intuition to pressure companies to be better — and politicians think we don’t care enough about these issues to warrant or incentivise regulatory action.
There are many people working to develop new forms of communicating complexity, but often they are designed for people either already working in technology fields, or stumbling into something new. New publications are working to increase explainability of complex content; visual designers are leveraging user interfaces as teachers of technical interplay; animators are breaking down complex technical concepts that underpin probabilistic systems; companies are hiring science communicators; researchers are studying explainability…in machine learning research papers; and people are building entire dictionaries of metaphors that can be used to explain technical concepts.
This work is exciting — we should support and encourage it. But we also need to develop more accessible conceptual scaffolding, more clearly connect concepts, and build a path for those interested in understanding how it all fits together. Our aim is not a world in which everyone is a coder, or statistician, or designer, or engineer. Or a world where everyone wants to be a technologist.
We want a world where it is possible for all of us to build technical intuition and reclaim our individuality and agency within and about digital systems.
If you are working on ways to support non-techie communities to develop technical intuition, I would love to hear from you. What are you doing to create insight and understanding? What types of insights are leading to stronger technical intuition? What effects is that having on those you are working with?
Thanks to Janet Haven, Ali Gharavi, Zara Rahman, Lucy Bernholz, Elizabeth Eagen, and Nicole Anand for helping me shape these ideas.
Executive Director and Co-Founder
Alix is a recovering researcher with a passion for applying creative solutions to difficult problems. She is a hunter and gatherer, identifying data and technology strategies that can empower social change initiatives around the world to maximise their impact and make the most of their resources. She co-founded The Engine Room and leads it to be a nimble organisation that provides direct support where, when, and how initiatives need it. She sits on the Advisory Council of Open Technology Fund, and the Technology Advisory Council of Amnesty International. She plays a mean game of chess.
In June, Helene Wolf suggested in this blog post that “strategy and culture should have breakfast together…” Her comment was made following an International Civil Society Centre -sponsored meeting of programme, policy and operations directors in which participants discussed how to increase the impact of their organisations and their work. Peter Drucker’s observation that “culture eats strategy for breakfast” when strategy and culture are not aligned surfaced more than once during these discussions.
Indeed, in our work with International Civil Society Organisation (ICSO) leaders over the past few years, we have found that failing to make the necessary adjustments to the existing culture when introducing a major change or executing a new strategy is one of the top six hazards to which ICSOs are most susceptible. Sometimes this failure is due to a lack of appreciation for the critical role that culture plays in helping or hindering realisation of change; other times, it is due to the leader’s hope that the necessary culture change will somehow take care of itself. In our experience, when it is not specifically attended to, culture inevitably undermines or even defeats full realisation of the change or strategy.
To circumvent this hazard, leaders need to understand the components of organisational culture, as well as when and how to attempt to change it so that it will support their changes or new strategies. In our latest paper, we define organisational culture — “the way we do things around here”— as the patterns of shared mindsets and behaviours which have been acquired over time by members of the organisation. Culture provides guidance, whether intentional or not, on what is done (or not), how it is done (if it is), and why it is (or isn’t) done. Culture permeates every organisation and plays an important role in providing a strong foundation for organisational success in stable environments. This is because culture operates in ways that ensure its own continuity. Thus, when an organisation needs to maintain the status quo, the culture that has contributed to that current state helps to keep everything on track. However, when a major change or disruption requires a shift in the prevailing mindsets and behaviours, the organisation’s existing culture will likely work to defeat it.
Before introducing a major change or executing a new strategy, ICSO leaders need to identify the mindsets and behaviours that are critical to fully realising the desired impact of the change or strategy, and assess to what extent these mindsets and behaviours are present in the existing culture. The greater the gap between the existing culture and the one required for full realisation, the higher the risk of not achieving the desired change outcomes and the greater the effort in making the necessary cultural shifts.
Leaders also need to assess the strength of the existing culture. Strong cultures that are inconsistent with the new change or strategy can present formidable challenges to leaders’ attempts to change them. In these cases, shifting the culture may prove too great a challenge or may exceed the organisation’s capacity to change at that point in time. The alternative to changing the culture is to “change the change” itself in ways that lessen the gap between the existing culture and the one required for successful realisation of the change.
Unfortunately, the reality is that many important initiatives cannot be accomplished if they are significantly modified. When this is the case, rather than change the change, leaders may have no other choice than to change the culture.
Culture change should not be taken on casually, nor should the potential need for it be deferred or ignored. Shifting cultural norms is one of the most challenging endeavours an organisation can undertake. Regardless of the final decision—to change the culture or to change the change itself—leaders need to be mindful of aligning the mindsets and behaviours of their organisation with those required by the change or new strategy. Otherwise, they face almost certain disappointment and frustration in not fully realising the intent of their organisational changes or strategies.
Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer
With more than four decades of experience helping senior leadership teams around the globe execute major transformational changes, Ed has worked with nonprofits and NGOs, as well as companies in the pharmaceutical, federal government, financial services, and professional services sectors. His work has reinforced to him the role character plays in successfully executing significant changes. Prior to joining forces with Daryl Conner in 2014 to form Conner Advisory, Ed was a partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) where he led the U.S. People and Change consulting practice. In this role, Ed was responsible for leading a team of practitioners who helped clients drive large-scale strategic change, as well as transforming HR into a more effective function and optimizing organizational talent. A recognized leader in the field of transformational change, Ed is a frequent speaker on issues relating to leadership, strategy execution, and organizational performance. He co-authored Strategic Speed: Mobilize People, Accelerate Execution (Harvard Business Press, 2010), which provides a blueprint for leaders who are executing transformational change in their organizations. Ed earned his Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Pennsylvania. While at Penn, he also received The Wharton School Certificate in Business Administration.