KENYA: World Financial Crisis threatens funding for a Maasai community organisation

Record ID: 361753

  • Title: KENYA: World Financial Crisis threatens funding for a Maasai community organisation
  • Date: 28th February 2009
  • Summary: RIFT VALLEY, KENYA (RECENT) (REUTERS) VARIOUS OF MICHAEL OLE-SAYO, MATONYOK NOMADS ORGANISATION (MANDO) FOUNDER, WALKING AMONG THORNY ACACIA TREES
  • Embargoed: 15th March 2009 12:00
  • Keywords:
  • Location: Kenya
  • Country: Kenya
  • Topics: Finance
  • Reuters ID: LVA1NU7XUJADWXHE5MXI0B4CS4Z
  • Story Text: The world financial crisis is beginning to affect people and communities far from the world's financial centres, many of whom rely on aid. In Kenya's remote southern Rift Valley, a small Maasai organisation is feeling the first ripples in what could become a funding tsunami.
    To catch a ride to Nairobi Michael Ole Sayo, a 24-year-old Maasai living in Kenya's Rift Valley, negotiates fields of volcanic rock boulders, thorn trees, and lions.
    These days, however, a more immediate threat is one that should seem far off for communities living on the Rift Valley floor.
    The world financial crisis is impeding funding for the projects Ole Sayo has set up, together with several volunteers, to help the Maasai community.
    One of a generation of mobile young Maasai as comfortable in the internet cafes of downtown Nairobi as in their parents' huts, well educated Ole Sayo has given up job opportunities in the city to work with his Maasai community.
    He and several friends started the Matonyok Nomads' Organisation or MANDO, to try and look after the needs of their community.
    To set up his organisation, he and colleagues spent months canvassing some 7,000 homesteads, home to around 150,000 Maasai, scattered across Kenya's southern Rift Valley.
    Its main mission is to find solutions to problems the community faces.
    Some problem, like non-existent land titles, date back to colonial times.
    Others, like climate change, are more recent.
    Ole Sayo researches the problems, offers solutions and then finds financial backing to implement the solutions.
    MANDO's funding requirements are a few thousand dollars or less for each project, which is a tiny in the multi-billion dollar aid industry.
    They include building rainwater-harvesting tanks at the local school which has no water or electricity, helping Maasai beadworkers market their beads, increasing awareness about the dangers of female circumcision and improving inoculation and water supplies for cattle.
    Projects like his are usually funded by larger aid organisations - and Michael has heard that some of the big organisations have already had to cut budgets, due to the financial crisis. He is worried.

    "This problem of a crisis across even Asia and America is affecting even the pastoralist communities here in Kenya. Because most of the programmes are donor funded. So if the donors don't get money, we as the last kind of grass-roots people, we are not getting funding also," he explained.
    But Ole Sayo is not waiting for the first big waves of an impending Tsunami, to hit. With just $500 in personal savings and donations from the community, Ole Sanyo has stocked the MANDO office -- previously furnished with just a simple desk and computer -- with essential foodstuffs, turning it into a small community stall.
    The small profits the stall makes go back into the community projects.

    "The people themselves, they know that this is a community kind of initiative and finally they have to buy goods here - at a price that is a little bit cheaper - because they know they are supporting their own developments in the community," Ole Sayo said.
    Climate change has hit this part of Kenya hard over the past few years.
    With fodder and water for cattle increasingly scarce, the regular droughts that are part of life in the Rift Valley now put communities at risk of starvation. Now much-needed assistance could dry up, too.

    "It is denying people with great needs, with many needs, the opportunity whereby their projects could have been supported. So we are not really happy with the progress of this crisis which actually is very many miles away from Kenya," Ole Sayo said.
    A foot injury and and partial blindness barely trouble Ole Sayo as he ducks under thorn trees and skirts dust-devils, the dust whirlwinds that mark dry season in the Rift Valley.
    But faced with already with enormous challenges, he is almost incredulous that there is yet another obstacle in his way.
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