Excellent! - excellentdevelopment.com

The Utooni Development Project was formed in 1978 by Excellent co-founder Joshua Mukusya. The community self-help project has been going for nearly 30 years, a strong sign of its success - it is almost unheard of across the world for a community development project to last so long.

Here, co-founders Esther Ithau, Rodah Silu and Susan Mukusya share the story of their journey – not just a journey of incredible progress - but one that led to the launch of Excellent Development in 2002.

"We started the Utooni Development Project in 1978 because we had a common problem: water shortage.

There were six families in the community. Joshua had an idea and he thought of getting the families together, both men and their wives, to discuss this problem. He talked to those six families first and then we came together. We called this group Utooni, after a village named after a wild fruit that is eaten by kids and the oil from the fruit used for wheelbarrows! The six families are all still active members except one family. This family dropped out because it was self-centred and not interested in sharing - they didn’t want to expand the membership to other people. They wanted to keep all the assets and knowledge to the original six families and we felt that others should benefit from our ideas.

The six families used to meet at the water points around midnight while we queued up waiting for water - about 6 km from our homes. We would sit around and talk about our problems. And then we said, “How long will we continue to meet around the wells talking like this?” So we also talked about what else we would do if we got water.

We decided to start a sand dam. We got assistance from NCCK (National Council of Churches in Kenya) - thirty bags of cement. So we built a sand dam, all of us working together. That was in 1979. When that was finished, we said, “We have a sand dam and water, but we are still hungry. We need to have food.”

“Hunger...we were hungry. And our six families did not have sufficient food. So we prioritised food after water.”

We had small plots for demonstration and we asked some government extension workers to help us. We decided to invite everybody who was interested to these workshops. We held the first one in 1980 and 120 people came. The extension officer talked about growing crops that could do well in our hot climate with little rain.

We soon noticed that our crops were doing much better and we had more food. But then we realised that we were not using the correct foods and we needed a better diet and routine. So the government health people came and did a seminar on proper feeding. After this seminar, we chose a committee of seven women to do a baseline survey for us on health issues. This survey showed that pregnant mothers were not attending pre-natal clinics and young children were not attending ante-natal clinics. Also, we knew we did not have a good family planning system. We wanted to know how to space children better so that we could take care of them and educate them. We wanted to know how to balance our food and better our diets.

After several seminars, other people wanted to join our group. We were meeting every Monday. We were no longer meeting at midnight around the water point. Now we met at a farm for demonstrations and training.

About this time we started talking about our problem with firewood. We were busy with our good fields, and attending many seminars, and we no longer had time to walk 6 kilometres to get firewood. So in 1981 we started to plant tree nurseries. In our first tree nursery we planted 21 trees per member. Seven of these were fruit trees: mango, pawpaw, guava, banana & lemons grafted from oranges.

By 1981 we had 60 members registered. Each member had to pay 60 KSh (about £3 at the time) to register, and then 5 KSh a year. We had field days and other people came to those, often 100 to 120 people. The registered members contributed time and money to each event. Then we discussed how we were contributing cash to the events, but we had no income. So we started talking about how we could get some income.

By 1983 we started making baskets for women to sell. Men started making sticks for walking and cooking. Some of us did casual labour for local rich people. Our tree nurseries produced seedlings to sell for income. And we started selling the produce from our improved gardens: planting onions, tomatoes, kale, and other vegetables.

About this time, we noticed that many of the women were having family problems. The women in our group had increased family income, and the men wanted to spend it. Also, the women were working from early in the morning until late at night, and this meant that the man did not always have his meals when he wanted them. We decided to make a committee for Social Development, to look into these problems.

Soon we had a committee structure. Each committee had seven people. People could be on several committees. In a few years we had many committees focused on different aspects of our lives: Water, Animal Husbandry, Agriculture, Food & Seed Storage, Income, Soil Conservation, Social, Tree Planting, Health, Training and Exchanges.

Then we created a Central Committee to organise all of our committees! This Central Committee was formed by one representative from each of our committees, which we now called sub-committees. At each Central Committee meeting, held once a month, each of the sub-committees presented a report of their work. We choose the officers from this Central Committee, and do elections every three years. Good committee members can be re-elected – currently all committee members are women – apart from the Treasurer, Peter. We have only had three Chairmen since the beginning, starting with Joshua and lately Esther Ithau – who has served five terms!

We now had increased food production, but did not know how to store it. There was a drought and famine in 1983-1984, and we realised that if we had been able to keep our extra harvest as seeds from the year before, we would not have suffered as much in the drought. We had taken all our crops to the market, and had none at home. So we learnt about food treatment and storage and asked every member to bring seeds to a common store for the years of drought and famine.

We found that some of our members still did not have any food to last until the next harvest. Their farms had washed away. So in 1984-1985 we started to introduce digging terraces and organised work days to help each other. Every week we planned an activity, and sometimes two activities. We were making dams, digging terraces or planting nurseries, and the women were out doing all these activities and not home. The men and the mothers-in-law were not happy!

In 1984 we started merry-go-rounds. The merry-go-round was arranged so that each month we visited a member’s home where everyone paid 20 KSh into a pot. Then 1,200 KSh was available to loan to one person. Our merry-go-rounds have gone on for many years until now. They started when we wanted to serve tea for our group, and we realised that many people could not afford cups to serve tea or even milk for the tea. They had no milk. This made us realise that they had no milk for their children either.

We got a World Neighbors grant to start a larger revolving loan scheme. This is when we bought our first cows, contributing one half of the purchase price of the cow with the rest being a one year loan. This project was managed by the Social Committee. They knew the very low income members who needed special help: families who did not have money to buy school uniforms or pay school fees.

As we worked with these families, we realised that some children would not be able to go to secondary school, as there were examinations to get into these schools, and not every child would be able to get the necessary marks to qualify. So in 1985 we started a Technology Centre, where these children could do vocational training in sewing, carpentry, masonry and simple accounting to enable them to work locally or in towns. The needlework and tailoring school is still going on.

So many people learned about our group and wanted to join that we encouraged them to start their own groups. We would meet with them to teach them what we did. There were so many people wanting help that we formed a department for training new groups. This experience was later used to start Excellent Development in 2002.

In 1985, we really started on income generating activities. We started little by little to buy land and build rental properties in Kola village to give us income in our old age. Over the years this has grown tremendously. We have now built a total of 24 rented rooms with communal water tanks and toilets – known as the best accommodation in the area – which gives each member an annual dividend. We are already planning to build even more in 2008!

In 1986 we also bought land for a Maternal and Child Health Centre (MCH). The government said that if we provided the building, they would staff it. In 1988 we built the main building and we later added the staff accommodation to meet their changing requirements. The Government never provided the staff and the MCH never opened. However, the Utooni Health Committee did enable the nearby dispensary to be upgraded to a health centre and most of the pre- and post-natal services we wanted are now available to our families.

The MCH complex never fulfilled its dream - but it has been used for youth expeditions since 1992 and now provides accommodation for up to six expeditions a year of overseas visitors from the UK and North America. The Utooni Project now rents the MCH to Excellent Development for its Kenya HQ – not just an alternative dream come true, but more income for the pioneers that are The Utooni Development Project!"

Read the secrets of their success