It’s barely 3 weeks to the general elections and the political temperatures are rising day in day out. As these events unfold, Map Kibera Trust has embarked on doing different activities in readiness for the big task just around the corner.
Recently we actively participated in the Party primaries nominations and updated what was going on the ground. The exercise that was characterized by confusion by late arrival of voting materials, voting places so very many citizens wait for longer hours until later in the afternoon when the exercise started.
A few days after, there were riots witnessed in Kibera starting from Olympic where the Road leading to Ayany, Kianda and on was barricaded with burning tires. The bone of contention was that, one of the contestants was to be given a certificate but it later was given to a different contender. This sparked the violence that saw the Red Rose School in Olympic destroyed with angry protestors.
A few days later we organized a VOK presentation that targeted 30 people but 27 people showed up as 11 out of those, showed interest to actively participate in the Voice of Kibera activities as far as covering the events after, during and after the elections. The presentation was interactive as the attendees asked questions, commented and agreed to participate in the citizen journalism activities.
“Voice of Kibera should make use of social network and beware of its exploitations where it can be tagged and sensor hate-speech from its followers”, said Otieno one of the attendees at the forum.
With this in mind, the Voice of Kibera bid to monitor and cover the elections was gaining momentum as we seek to do the same presantation in areas of Olympic,Katwekera, Kisumu Ndogo and Kambi Muru
Why the Community Presentations
These are done mainly to bring the community onboard in terms of monitoring and reporting on what is happening in village’s across Kibera, community engagements and to do away with other mainstream media propaganda which has in the past tarnished Kibera name. It is also done to sensitize the masses of the existence of the Voice of Kibera platform and its works in the community.
We also successfully managed to carry out the posters and fliers distribution displaying the number and what people can report about before, during and after the general elections. The process is still on-going in order to cover a wider part of Kibera with plarking posters in strategic areas remaining but to be completed soon.
The Voice of Kibera together with the other Map Kibera Trust programs also managed to carry out the Stakeholder mapping process last year whose aim was to engage Organizations in Kibera on participation and linking up with local media houses which included Pamoja FM, Kibera Mirror, Kibera Journal and KiberaTV.
We trust that before the elections date, we shall have done awareness enough to enable as many people as possible to contribute to reporting of the happenings during this time that a lot of monitoring is needed so as to present Kibera to Kenya and the world as it is/ will be at that time of elections.
