Excellent! - excellentdevelopment.com

The innocent foundation is a long-term supporter of Meka community group. Graham from the innocent team visited the project while he was on holiday in East Africa...

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It was Thursday lunchtime and I was coming to the end of my holiday in Tanzania and Kenya. I’d been to climb Kilimanjaro, squeezed in a couple of days safari, and even learnt to scuba dive on Zanzibar, but I had one more stop before heading back to work in the UK…

My name’s Graham and I work for innocent drinks, the smoothie people. Each year the company donates 10% of its profit to the innocent foundation, which works with NGOs and community projects around the world. One of these is Excellent Development, an organisation based just outside Nairobi in a small village called Kola. I couldn’t go all the way to Kenya and miss out on visiting the project, so I set aside the last 4 days of my holiday to check out the work innocent were helping to support.

The first thing that struck me about Kenya was how beautiful the country was – it’s easy to understand why the tourists flock there, as the wildlife and scenery are spectacular. Another thing, however, was the poverty and inequality that exists. In Nairobi the rich and poor live side-by-side, with dozens of people crammed into shoddy iron huts in the slums backing onto huge villas surrounded by security huts and high walls. As I drove towards Kola and the countryside became more rural, conditions by which I was used to living were left behind in Nairobi and simple things that most Westerners take for granted, like running water and electricity, seemed like luxuries.

Kola itself is a bustling market village where people come from the surrounding communities to trade, overlooked by Excellent Development's compound. After meeting some of the team and grabbing a peanut butter sandwich we set off to visit the first community – it was clear people didn’t sit still for long here! I was being accompanied by Kyalo (the team manager), Matthew (the driver), and Ray (a professor in International Development visiting from Canada). First we went to see some of the sand dams. Kyalo explained that life in rural Kenya literally revolves around the search for water, which is why Excellent Development’s primary focus is on water conservation. A sand dam is an ingeniously simple piece of technology that involves blocking dried up rivers with a wall of concrete. When the rains come sand is washed downstream and gathers behind the dam, which stores and filters the water preventing it from evaporating. The dry season follows but water locked in the dam can be accessed by digging small scoop holes (just like when you dig a hole at the beach and the water comes bubbling up through the sand) and hey-presto, a water source is created! Previously some villagers had to travel more than 10 miles to fetch water, and then walk back balancing a 20kg container on their heads in temperatures soaring over 30°c. For some, the search for water dominated their lives to detriment of family life, education, and farming, so the difference that a clean and local water source can make is quite literally life changing. Adults can now focus on other money earning activities like agriculture, and with water to put on their crops the chances of growing enough to eat and sell are multiplied. Children can go to school, which is critical to breaking the cycle of poverty in the long-term. They even have some free time now for social activities, further helping to improve quality of life.

An important part of transforming the landscape is the digging of terracing and trenches. Terraces are a system of ‘steps’ that are dug into the hillside creating flat pieces of land for use in agriculture and preventing soil erosion, while trenches help to control the flow of water and improve moisture retention. This step is critical to boosting the fertility of the soil to improve productivity and in maintaining an effective sand dam. They hold more water if they fill with sand rather than silt (because silt is much finer and leaves less gaps in the sand for water molecules), so terraces must be dug parallel to the river to stop silt being washed into the dam.

My second day was probably the highlight (and good timing) as Excellent Development were organising a community exchange programme, which saw two bus loads of villagers making the long drive to Meka, one of the communities that has benefited directly from the innocent foundation’s funding. Excellent Development has been working with the community in Meka for some time and they have already put in the hard work of building sand dams, digging terracing, setting up tree nurseries, and installing water piping systems. Another aspect of Excellent Development’s work is educating communities about the best things to grow, whether subsistence and cash crops, medicinal plants, or plants to protect the soil. The purpose of today was for the different communities to share what they have been learning, and for the visitors to really see what can be achieved to help motivate them to do the same. It was a great day and there was a bit of a carnival atmosphere, with lots of dancing and singing. People in this part of Kenya rarely travel far from their own village and everyone was wearing their smartest clothes, which gave me the impression that this was quite a special occasion. However, there was also the serious business of visiting parts of Meka where work has been done. The visitors asked lots of questions and took copious notes, while their hosts proudly displayed the fruits of their efforts. My feet were quite sore by the end of the day but it was an eye-opening insight into Kenyan life.

After I had said my goodbyes Matthew dropped me off at Nairobi airport. I had an 8 hour flight to reflect on what had been an incredible three weeks, but my experience in Kola will stay with me for a long time. It was amazing to see how much had been achieved and that it’s possible to create genuine and long lasting change. I felt lucky to have met such a passionate team of people committed to improving the lives of their fellow Kenyans.

Excellent Development don’t struggle finding communities wanting to work with them because it’s easy to understand the value of having sand dams and terraces, but the real challenge is motivating people that they need to be in it for the long haul. It isn’t a short term solution and requires commitment and hard work on the part of the community. Excellent Development provide materials, expertise, and education, but ultimately it is the community who lay the stones of the dams, dig kilometres of trenches, and are responsible for the success or failure of the plants and trees. This sense of ownership is important in helping to ensure that the community play an active role in their own development.

It sounds like a bit of a cliché, but the Excellent Development approach to development is very much a case of teach a man to fish and he will feed himself for a lifetime. We’ve seen decades of well-meaning charities in the developed World pouring money into Africa yet the problems still remain, which is proof that her problems are too complex to be easily solved. For me this highlights the real value of what Excellent Development are trying to achieve – helping people to help themselves. There is no dignity in receiving charity, but seeing the villagers in Meka and the pride on their faces as they showed off what they had achieved was humbling. Life out there is pretty tough, but they were able to say, “We did this.”

And that really is excellent development.