“Volunteering is a stepping stone to learning about the community and attracting wider opportunities"

In 2019, VSO was forming several chapters of Youth for Sustainable Development (YSD) across most of Kenya's 47 counties. By February 2020, just before the pandemic hit, a friend invited me to a life skills training meeting with YSD after which we were able to also become trainers ourselves. 

Unfortunately, a month later before we could run the trainings, the government announced lockdown and halted our plans. During the pandemic, we were able to work through what we call the Kisumu Youth Caucus, trying to help the government implement the Ministry of Health containment measures for COVID-19. That included distributing sanitisers, hand washing points, and protective gear to traders, boda riders, and students. 

At that time transport was limited and a lot of people who were using transport were using motorcycles, so motorcyclists were often the first point of contact [with COVID-19]. So, we worked with the county government of Kisumu, alongside other organisations, and as VSO we distributed sanitisers, masks and reflectors that had messages on how to protect yourself from COVID so that the travellers could read them.  

Had you volunteered previously before joining VSO? 

During college, I served as a peer educator with I Choose Life Africa (ICL) at Maseno University, focusing on peer education: information, education, communication, behaviour change and active health rights education. Following that, I volunteered with Naya Kenya, for a while I was a writer for national newspapers and advocating for policy changes to promote inclusion and budget advocacy. I also volunteered in an organisation with a friend of mine called Etonogo Bunga, where we worked in collaboration with YSD Kisumu for social accountability. 

What is the project and your role in it? 

I’m on the placement right now I'm a national volunteer for the ACTIVE project in Kilifi as a sexual reproductive health and rights advisor. I've been here since November 2022.  

ACTIVE is an abbreviation for Active Citizenship Through Inclusive Volunteering and Empowerment. It’s an integrated project under the three main pillars of VSO – education, livelihoods, and health. We are trying to create and improve the agency of citizens to know and demand their rights, and work with healthcare providers and policymakers to create a policy environment that is accommodative of their needs.  

How did the community engage with you when you first arrived? 

We work with community volunteers, national volunteers, and international volunteers. The presence of community volunteers made it a little bit easier for us to move into the community; I think this is the mistake a lot of other organisations make – they just move into communities without the community seeing some of themselves in the project.

With VSO, people see at least one or two of their own community in the project, they know that it really does have their input, and is targeted to solve some of the issues they have. The community volunteers helped us a lot in introducing the project to the community first. 

How did you find that the relational model of working with different types of volunteers contributes to your personal and professional development?  

About two months ago we had an international volunteer called Koshiki from the UK. We worked around some of the collectives we have – small groups that represent a bigger group, for example the fisher folk, who deal with fishing, boats, and the whole supply chain of fishing. We also have collectives that work with forest management, women’s groups, peer educators, students, and climate change.  

We were able to visit some of these collectives and government officials that we work with, conducting a study to try and tighten any gaps. We wanted to find ways to improve in the new year, to ensure there are no loopholes in our working relationship. 

Most of the feedback we got really did show that close working relationship, and even the governor himself was aware of the work that we do in this county. It was very encouraging to know how much impact we've had in just over a year. 

What's been your biggest challenge on the project?

ACTIVE is an advocacy-based project. A lot of community members still don't understand that aspect of taking a project. A lot of development partners that have been in Kilifi before will just call community members for meetings then give them some tokens. But then community members are just going to this meeting for that token, so they don't really put effort in making the situation better – it's just about going to the meeting and earning.  

For ACTIVE, we try to make sure that we share advocacy and then, crucially, we follow it up. We’re making sure that you are better than when we found you and you’re not just at these meetings to get a token to go home with. It was a challenge to break that ice initially but then over time it's become better, and we can go to a community and hold dialogues and community forums. 

What changes have you seen in the mindset and behaviours of the community? 

I think we have encouraged the uptake of public participation, so that the community takes consideration of participating in government affairs. For the longest time, the community members always thought that it's not necessary to take part in things like shaping projects in the community, so whenever public participation forums are called, you'd find not a lot of people would be keen to attend them. We've been able to show that these forums are vital for improving local conditions and advocating for necessary developments like medical facilities, schools, and water infrastructure. 

They've also been able to use the right channels to find out the progress of a project or initiatives – they can ask, “What's the progress of the health centre you promised us?” or, “How can we make that better as a community working with the government?”. They're no longer afraid of the government as an enemy of the people, they can approach the government, hold dialogue, and agree on a few issues here and there.

The local government has also shifted in terms of inclusion. Because social inclusion is one of the major pillars of VSO and as ACTIVE, it has been taken into a lot of consideration in terms of budget allocations and project spaces. Where the government hosts an audience, they usually make sure that there's a sign language interpreter and support for people with low vision or are blind, so nobody is left behind. 

Could you recall someone who's supported you both professionally and personally on the project?

We've supported the community a lot in holding some of those meetings where we can participate and give our input on social accountability, especially social inclusion, and the aspect of volunteerism in policies. 

For the longest time there wasn't a clause that supported volunteerism or even social inclusion in a lot of the county policy documents, so when they needed technical guidance, we were there to advise. We were part of the Climate Change Act, the Disability Act, and we’re part of the reproductive and maternal neonatal child and adolescent health bill, which is under formation. We've given input in the gender-based violence bill, and the youth policy, which was launched recently. 

I'd especially like to highlight one of your collectives called Kilifi Youth on the Move (KYOM). The KYOM do wonderful work in education. Most of them are unemployed youth with background in teaching or in education, and they hold unofficial classes for young people who may have dropped out of school for whatever reason, and they help them register for the national examinations so that they can have that secondary school education certificate – which is really a requirement for a lot of jobs here. 

We've also supported their education programs and even been part of their podcast. We want to be part of their processes to highlight the kind of work that they're doing, and how we're working together with them. 

How would you describe your typical day? 

For us in Kilifi, we share an office space with an organisation called Kesho Kenya, who also do a lot of work in education, but we also have the option of working from home whenever it's convenient.  

My typical day would involve going to the office, checking out if I have a lot of backlogs, if I have meetings with development or government partners, or we have community forums. In a day we'd attend one or two of those. 

We break down our quarterly plans into monthly plans and weekly plans and daily plans, so we can follow that through. Of course, sometimes something comes up that wasn't factored in the plan, so we distribute that among amongst ourselves. We have four community volunteers and four national volunteers so we'd agree who will represent us at which meetings. Then at the end of the day we have our WhatsApp group for the briefing, we talk about how the day went, the successes, and what needs to be improved. 

What is the highlight of your week? 

Probably on Fridays, when we are getting to summarise the successes of the week. There's a lot of energy and we are psyched up going into the weekend, and then the new week, to deliver our duties and meet our goals. 

In Kilifi we've developed a work environment where, as volunteers, we try to make sure that aside from work we are all okay. We are open with each other, and if someone is going through a tough time, they know they can talk about it. No one works in silos, and we try to encourage that, so that we can support each other.  

What motivates you?

There's a quote by a Robert Anton Williams, which says, “under the present brutal and primitive conditions on this planet, every person you meet should be regarded as one of the walking wounded. we have never seen a man or woman not slightly deranged by either anxiety or grief. we have never seen a totally sane human being.”   

You can look at the people you are working with and, even though they won’t say it explicitly, assume that they are going through something and could be in a dark corner. It could be they don't want to talk to anybody, but the least you can do is just be kind to them, don't make life any bit tougher for them, try to speak to them nicely, try to offer a helping hand whenever you can, try to make them smile, laugh, whichever way you can.

At the end of the day, we're supposed to be making it a little bit lighter for the next person. 

What do you think about volunteering as an approach to development?  

My focus is on the intention, and if I compare the intentions of volunteering compared to paid work, you find that a lot of volunteers do it out of the belief that they have something to contribute that will make society a little bit better. 

On the flip side, if you look at, for example, of our government offices – people will go in the morning, go for a long lunch break, wait for the evening, go back home, see that they've done their day, they've done their part. They don't have a drive to do the work. There's no urgency to make things better or to improve stuff.  

When it comes to volunteerism, the moment we go out without expectation of payment, it saves people. It saves those who are willing to make the situation better and those who are out there to just earn and go home. Volunteerism is a good way to differentiate these two, and of course, it puts you together with the people who share the same philosophy. 

You can want to go out there and educate young people, and guaranteed you'll not walk alone on that journey; you'll always find people with the same interest in looking for ways to improve things. At the end of the day, you find your ideas and somebody else's ideas come together to form something bigger than you planned. So, I'd encourage it, I'd encourage it a lot. If possible, the government should open opportunities for volunteering as a way to get into other government sectors, because volunteering develops something extra inside human beings. 

What would you say makes VSO distinct from other NGOs? 

VSO takes a lot of care of the volunteers. I know that, if I go to the community, I'm well taken care of in terms of my travel, my meals, safeguarding. I don't have to worry about harm from colleagues or primary actors. If I fall sick or get unwell during the journey, there's medical support available through insurance. There's also a lot of other types of support, including having a safe space with other colleagues. 

There's a lot of training available too. For example, the online Kaya courses, where you learn about things like compliance and safeguarding. A lot of this is to develop as a volunteer, but at the end of the volunteering time you also come away better than when you first started. 

There are so many development partners that have volunteers but most of them exhaust the energies of the volunteers and do not really offer anything in return. They're always just taking from the volunteers, but they do not develop them in terms of education and further training. 

What specific skills have you developed since you've been working on the project? 

One of the skills is partnership-building and networking. We're exposed to ministries, we're exposed to local government, we're exposed to the national government, and even international development partners. For example, the other day we went to a conference in Kigali, Rwanda, and I was manning the booth, and I found a good opportunity to pull in a few interested parties who liked the work that we do. Partnership-building and networking has become something that I'm very good at, and getting better every day.  

Another skill is facilitation, because sometimes the work that we do involves guiding and talking to an audience. Facilitation develops other skills, and you learn to communicate better, you become more patient, and you deliver your content in a more compelling way. You can resolve problems more efficiently through communication. 

What would you tell someone who is considering volunteering with VSO?

They need to look at volunteering as a long-term investment. Sometimes people look at a six-month contract and think that’s all it is, but you have a lot of opportunities for growth within VSO and some of us have been able to even get recommended for scholarships and other jobs. Looking to the long term is the whole idea of VSO. 

Where personally do you think you've made the most difference to the community?

We've been able to work a lot in the policy papers, contributing technical assistance to the development of the Climate Change Act, the Disability Act, youth policy, the reproductive maternal and neonatal child and adolescent health bills, the Gender-Based Violence Act. We’ve even contributed to the county’s integrated development plan, which is the five-year plan for the county, especially when it comes to social inclusion and volunteering clauses.  

How do you think VSO volunteers make an impact on the community?  

Volunteering is a stepping stone to learning about the community and attracting wider opportunities for that community nationally, regionally, and internationally. When we had the ICS (International Citizen Service Programme) when you learn about a community and then you go back to where you work it's easy for you to develop solutions because you already know what the challenges are now you can to sit down share ideas and have like concrete evidence-based or data-driven solutions for those issues."

The ACTIVE programme

ACTIVE aims to reach 2.5 million people across 19 countries - Bangladesh, Cambodia, eSwatini, Kenya, Malawi, Mozambique, Nepal, Nigeria, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia - by mobilising marginalised groups, such as women, young people and those with disabilities, to act on the issues that are most important to them and their communities. 

This funding will help strengthen locally led organisations and create a culture of active citizenship – where marginalised people actively engage with their own development - whilst building the capacity of the UK’s partner countries to respond to the needs of their citizens across healthcare, education and livelihoods. 

Learn more