1000 Ways To Change The World
Dear Traveler,
Thank you for stopping by.
My name is Ndung’u Wa Maina but most people know me by my English name, Steve. I grew up as a simple herds-boy along the gentle slopes of the Ngong Hills on the outskirts of Nairobi, the capital city of Kenya, in East Africa. At the feet of the range of hills, on the windward side, is a quaint little town called Ngong. This is where my 3 siblings and I went for everyday stuff like school, groceries or free public movie screenings on the market grounds on weekends. Up until the late 90’s everyone knew everyone else by family name. I once got soundly spanked on my way to school by a total stranger for innocently playing with a used condom. That same evening when I got home, I was thoroughly thrashed by my mom after the father of the neighbor of the lady who played the piano at my mom’s church reported what I had been up to that morning.
Not that I was indisciplined, I just didn’t know any better. In our staunchly conservative Kenyan society, sex and any of its associated paraphernalia is a strictly taboo subject. Teachers quickly gloss over it whenever it comes up in class, lest we asked too many practical questions and mortified parents slapped it out of our mouth for merely mentioning it. As a result, we grow up not knowing the risky from safe sexual activities that expose us to the HIV virus. In fact, 35,000 boys and girls below the age of 24 years contract HIV every year in Kenya. By the time you are done reading this article, 1 will have acquired the virus.
Take me for instance. For lack of a credible source, everything I know about sex I learnt from cheap glossy pornographic tabloids or chauvinistic books that glorified casual uninhibited sex and objectified women to maximize sales. These were and still are readily available at every street corner for 10 Kenya Shillings. If you couldn’t afford one, all you had to do was wait for a free, albeit well thumbed, copy to be passed around your peer group. At 13, I had read the Perfumed Garden and knew “10 easy ways to get into any girls underwear!” but not what a condom was used for or why it was even important.
The next 10 years of high school and university flew by in a haze of multiple casual and meaningful sexual encounters. In hindsight, it’s plain to see I was on a blind testosterone fueled race to try all the different moves learnt or score macho points with my peer group. It beats me to this day how I went through it all unscathed.
Then I met the one. With job security, came the need to find the proverbial love and settle down to raise a family. In no time we were expecting a baby girl who, however, was born before her term was due and had to be incubated for close to a month to reach the minimum viable weight to live on her own. Fortunately she pulled through but instead of rejoicing with happiness, I remember shamelessly crying in despair. I realized that that would be the easiest battle she would have to fight for her life in this cruel and unforgiving world I had naively brought her into. A world crawling with sexual predators and sexualized images of women everywhere you look. Our world, drowning in a cesspool of our own filth. And I shall not be there at all times to protect her.
I thought long and hard about this and came to the conclusion that the best I could do was use what I knew to make her world a bit better place to grow up in. A world augmented with technology to verify that every learning material she has access to was created by a qualified professional and approved by the government. Education is the key that opens the right doors only. If she can always make the right and informed decisions, I shall rest easy knowing my work is done and leave the rest to fate.
The opportunity presented itself in late 2016 when the Government of Kenya, United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), the UKaid and the Nailab Accelerator challenged us Kenyan youth to create solutions to enable easy access to Sexual Reproductive Health information through the I-Am Initiative. It’s one of the multi pronged approach by UNFPA and 10 other UN organisations to end AIDS by the year 2030.
5 years earlier, in our third year at the University of Nairobi, my two campus friends and I had developed a smartphone data collection app that could take fingerprints, signatures, text, pictures, audio and videos from anywhere in Kenya including the exact GPS coordinates of the data collection location. It was quickly adopted by the leading banks within the region that needed a mobile solution for their sales agents to open bank accounts and calculate personalized loan proposals while in the field. It so happens that African consumers prefer to buy something after having a face to face conversation about it with a familiar person on the roadside compared to the hallowed atmosphere of a traditional brick and mortar branch as it gives them the opportunity to catch up on births, marriages, deaths and weather news from the village unhurriedly.
For the I Am Innovation Challenge, we forked the code and customized the app to enable talented Kenyan youth collaborate online to create short local entertainment videos such as movies, comedies, music and animations that dramatize UNFPA’s Sexual Reproductive Health educational content then share for free on social media. We call it Edutainment. What’s even better, the youth content creators get to keep 90% of the net revenue generated from online advertising for economic empowerment. The app is Imara.Tv
In the last 9 months alone, 13 youth from Nairobi and Mombasa have collaborated with certified health professionals to create 36 videos which have reached over 750,000 youth in Kenya with lifesaving Sexual Reproductive Health information and generated 278,400 Kenya Shillings in advertising revenue for the youth to share. Using this sustainable business model, we are on course to reach all the 16 million youth in Kenya with credible SRH education while creating celebrity superstars that are positive online role models and scalable digital jobs for the countless unemployed but highly talented youth not only in Kenya but in Africa.
Following the success of our innovation, UNFPA nominated yours truly to represent our team at the Unleash Lab in Denmark from 13th August 2017 where 1000 young people who, having solved local challenges in their corners of the world, meet to co-create solutions to common challenges that threaten us all from attaining the Sustainable Development Goals by the year 2030. I’ve already met in person and talked online to fellow SDG talents from all over the world. They are unbelievably amazing humans and highly talented individuals who have achieved great feats of success in their chosen career paths. I’ve been awed by the social impact of their noble and selfless accomplishments in their home communities and marveled at their pragmatic idealist visions of our world’s future.
Unleash Lab is veritably a historic event of biblical proportions, unheralded in history and disruptive in vision. It’s a much needed intervention for the human race to stop and think about the trouble we are in. We are the generation that may have to adapt to a nocturnal lifestyle to escape the daytime heat of an increasingly hot world. To make it worse, it’s our fault and Mother Nature does not forgive or negotiate. There is no other super-secret public or private agency working on the SDG challenges at the scale of Unleash. We are our last shot. I shudder to think of the alternative if we fail. The price is too high as it is an existential one: The survival and spread of the human species in this universe.
Between you and me, I have to admit that none of us can change the world on our own. We don’t have all the answers. Our accomplishments, however commendable, can barely turn the tide of socio-economic challenges facing us today. But together, we are unstoppable. We are an idea whose time has come. We will mix up 1000 tried and tested ways that have changed each one of our worlds a bit to co-create globally scalable and disruptive solutions to shared problems. We are all millennials. We are entrepreneurs, doctors, engineers, artists and policy makers. We are your sons, daughters, neighbors, workmates and classmates. We are the world and our diversity is our only wealth. Our tools are the knowledge we have acquired over our lifetime pursuit of solving personal and communal social challenges, the courage to explore new frontiers and our young age. Yes, I say our age because time is money and we have lots of it to dedicate towards solving the worlds problems. Just look at the billions being spent searching for human immortality and youthful rejuvenation to appreciate your age. But time, like youth, is fleeting and we have so much work cut out ahead for us.
Follow our historic journey here as we answer this noble call of duty to save our kind and secure the future of countless generations not only for our children but also for the flora and fauna that we share our world and our universe with as we travel through space and time.
Yours truly,
Stephen Ndung’u Maina,
Sunday, August 6th, 2017,
Ngong, Nairobi, Kenya, Africa.
