Pamoja Initiative

Umra is a mother, a lover and a fighter with severe allergies to injustice. From humble beginnings in Tchundwa, a remote village off the Kenya’s northern coast, her pursuit for knowledge took her through the United World College of the Atlantic in Wales then off to Oberlin College in Ohio for a BA in Neuroscience and Psychology and finally through the World Learning Institute in Vermont for her MA in Social Justice in Intercultural Relations. This journey culminated to a visit back in her native Lamu where a modest project that Umra embarked on turned into an award winning initiative known as Safari Doctors. Her role imbues community leadership as she and her team travel to remote marginalised communities providing health services, mobilising the youth as agents of change in their communities and promoting civic engagement through public participation, sports and culture.  

I am committed to address the rhetoric around gender and cultural division that is commonly utilised to polarise the electorate from the very rural corners of our world through tribal politics to the global arena.  This continues to compromise a development agenda that is inclusive and innovative because an elite drives interests.

Indeed charity does begin at home. The proposed project is to facilitate a civic engagement boot camp for prospective and incumbent political leaders in the Lamu County Assembly ahead of our 2022 General Elections. 

How I see this project as elevating humanity is through the power of tapping into our global narrative of voicing the sidelined. However small or remote, we all have a significant role to play in serving and protecting the interests of those disenfranchised if we facilitate and elect capable humane leaders into office that intentionally includes women and the youth.

The challenge that I seek to address is the participation of women and youth in the political sphere and beyond. During the 2017 General Elections the first time in Kenya’s history, women were elected to serve as governors and senators. Women now hold 172 of the 1,883 elected seats in Kenya, up from 145 after the 2013 elections, a rather appalling statistic. Kenya’s constitution mandates that all appointed and elected bodies contain at least one-third women, yet only 9% ran for office. It is a global phenomenon that where youth and women are not at the center of political decisions. In order to do so one of the key problems to be addressed is amplifying the self-esteem and leadership skills, which we aim today through existing programs around sports for change where we use football to unite young men and swimming to build characters of young women. This is to organically feed into our governance program that seeks to facilitate young and female leaders to then step into the political arena. The problem that we are solving is a global one that calls for local baby steps.

The project is a movement in one of Kenya’s forty-seven counties that is Lamu. It encompasses four community driven programs that focus on: 1) Education; 2) Culture and Sports; 3) Climate Action; and most critical 4) Governance. All programs focus on mobilising youth and women to participate in society and strengthening awareness and confidence. This culminates to facilitating 10 candidates to run for office in each of the ten wards and facilitate a gubernatorial candidate to do the same for the 2022 General Elections.  A model borrowed from Brand New Congress in the United States of America. The project challenges status quo by giving an opportunity to young men and women to participate in the public sector and implement policies that reflect the realities of their communities.  The project offers workshops on governance, leadership and campaign processes for candidates seeking to run for office in Lamu County.

The community whose life I am working to directly and meaningfully improve is our community. The project serves the entire Lamu population of estimate 149,000 inhabitants by grooming capable and compassionate leaders who will dedicate their lives as public servants. In order to understand and articulate our needs, we have been operating core programs informed by the realities of our communities. The key program that has allowed us to connect and learn from the people is out monthly medical outreaches that I have been facilitating for the last five years reaching over a thousand people every month. It is through this program that we have been able to develop the project to meet the gaps. Some on-going programs include running a school, setting up waste management stations and sports for change. 

Upon establishing Safari Doctors Initiative, we built substantial rapport over the last five years. Due to the dearth of expertise and commitment in Lamu County, we have been filling in a vacuum beyond health programming. This resulted to the founding of Pamoja (meaning together in Swahili) Initiative to address the various challenges that include establishing a waste management center to combat ocean waste plastic in Lamu, founding a community early learning school that offers quality education and using sports to engage the youth as avenues of positive growth away from the drugs and radicalisation. With all these programs, the buck stops at the door of the County Assembly, dependent on government engagement. Studies show that “overall, participants had a narrow understanding of political participation, focused on voting or running for office rather than engaging in policy debates. Once they learned about additional opportunities for engagement, they expressed interest in exerting greater influence on public policy.” This understanding is what triggered the urgency of addressing development through strengthening the capacity of leadership and specifically engaging the women and youth of Lamu who are most affected by dysfunctional systems.

Because it gives me sleepless nights that my gender and culture gets to peg my daughter as a second class citizen. Because mediocrity is a norm since the bar in accountability is low. Because I walk into a room and I am expected not to have an opinion. I am passionate about my project because in so little time and such limited resources I have seen how much we been able to accomplish. Ten of thousands of our community members receiving affordable healthcare, reducing ocean waste pollution within months of a small program, introducing digital learning to schools that have no electricity, and the list goes on. Because of this passion, I am ready to put my life on the line for my community. 

My origins are from Pate Island in the Lamu archipelago and I was raised in Kenya, this project is our life and our children’s future. After completing graduate school and working in Washington, D.C. I decided cubicle life was not for me; I must give back at home. I returned to Lamu to explore my purpose and learned about a life saving medical aid project that had been abandoned because of Al Shabaab attacks in the area.  Despite the danger, in 2015, we launched Safari Doctors. The following year, I was selected a CNN Hero for this work. In 2017, I won an Africa Leaders 4 Change award, featured in Business Daily’s Top 40 Under 40 Women and won the United Nations in Kenya Person of The Year Award. In 2019, I was among three finalists for the Robert Burns Humanitarian Award. I am also an Aurora Forum Goodwill Ambassador and World Economic Forum Young Global Leader.  Through all these endeavors, I know that the universe has positioned me to serve my people.

I have build strong community rapport as a young indigenous mother, the classic case of a global villager who thrives in adversity and is keen on facilitating grassroots leadership. These attributes uniquely position me to deliver the project and address the challenges of our people.

The Carter Centre’s research showed that youth and women face serious financial, societal, and cultural challenges to full participation, including intimidation, harassment, and violence. This is something that I had only understood in theory until a few weeks ago when 6 police officers raided my compound. The reason being that I was running a school contradictory to the COVID-19 regulations. The entire village was sure that this was pure intimidation facilitated by the community patriarchs who have been significantly bothered by a young woman running a competitive learning institution.  What was expected to end up as a little shake up to teach me a lesson as to who is in power, escalated to an arrest that saw me and my two of my staff behind bars. It is during these five hours in police custody that I learnt and connected with the legal system, understood the difference between bail and bond, the ranks in the police department and the opportunity is sensitising the department around COVID-19 by facilitating the provision of face masks.  We got out on cash bail only to return the following week with no charges pressed.

On November 15, 2017 in my inbox was an email with the subject line reading “Nomination to the United Nations Person of the Year 2017 Award” for the selfless determination, commitment and leadership to provide much needed medical services in far flung areas of Kenya, sometimes in life threatening conditions. This recognition lead to significant experience that demonstrated my leadership capacity, most significantly to myself. The following year I was invited to the Kenya’s first SDG Partnership Platform Primary Healthcare Co-create workshop in March of 2018.  The workshop gathered over 100 senior representatives from the Ministry of Health, the Council of Governors, County Governments, and diverse senior representatives. During one of the breakout session where we were divided into our county governments, each group was tasked to develop health intervention strategies and later identify a role model in their community and later present to the wider panel.  Humbling it was to witness an unanimous chorus that those who I deemed as senior representatives of Lamu County felt that I was a notable role model, locally and nationally. This was simultaneously disturbing as we noted a dearth of leaders compared to our national counterparts.