Me in front of the Green Power dam

I arrived in Nairobi in mid-May. I was both excited and nervous. Excited because I have never been to East Africa and nervous because the internship was rather vague and I wasn’t 100% sure exactly what I was going to do. Upon arrival, I found I wasn’t too surprised at the environment around me. I find Nairobi very similar to any big city in India. In fact, Nairobi is much more developed than I ever imaginied it to be. Its like a huge metropolis with almost everything you can ever want–malls, cafes, fast food, shopping centers, nightclubs and much more. And of course its the most expensive city you can find in Kenya, with prices almost similar to that in Canada (if not more expensive). Unfortunately, my internship isn’t in Nairobi. Its 3 hours away in a small village called Kianyaga, near the slopes of Mount Kenya. This village is very rural and has extremely minimal facilities. Most important of which, electricity doesn’t exist. Thats why the NGO my internship is with was founded.  Green Power is an NGO that builds micro-hydro electrification turbines to generate sustainable electricity in the Mt. Kenya region. Since there is no electricity connection here, they aim to foster a new approach, and have local community members hold a majority share in the electricty company. After many years of building a dam and developing the inner workings of the company, other projects grew out of the movement, and a research office was founded. My internship is here. My first week I worked on an education project that was started last year and put on pause because the employees left for university. Its interesting that here almost no one knows which schools are close by and what courses they offer. I find this is because of the lack of resources with which to advertise. No electricity means no websites, tv ads, or even emails sometimes. If a student had a passion for engineering, he wouldnt know where to go or how to pursue his dream, let alone even the cost. Last year, the Kianyaga Research Office carried out a survey across all secondary schools in the region, documenting all their characteristics, including courses offered, cost, high school requirements, funding, contact information and much more. Being good with computers, I created a computer database in which to enter all the information. I then turned it in to a kind of search-engine, where people can search for schools by location, and view the courses each school offers. Its like a library database where you can search for books by author. Local students are now allowed to come to the office to use the database to search for schools and courses according to their own criteria. This was a wonderful opportunity to learn about the education system in rural Kenya and hopefully make a positive impact on enrollment.

My second project was an extremely helpful one and gave me a clear portrait of the community I was working with. A baseline survey was carried out in 2007 before the electricity project was started. This survey was very extensive and asked over 1000 questions, covering 3260 households, and documenting data ranging from religious affiliation, to household characteristics, to views on gender and political issues. This survey is to be done again after the electricity grid is complete, to see the changes in the community, positive or negative. My job was to analyze and interpret the data and create a presentation of my results. So I would use the database of responses, select the variables I wanted to analyze, and use stata9 to come up with statistical figures. So for example I would find the average size of a household, average number of cattle owned, source of drinking water by percentages, number of years of schooling by age and gender and many other ones. This not only gave me experience with statistics in research, but also gave me a clear idea of the people I was working with and the village i was working in. Moreover, I went into the fields to watch the field workers carry out other surveys with the same respondents of the baseline, so the numbers I was working with weren’t jusnt arbitrary entries. I had met some of the respondents whose answers I was anaylzing, so it was more that just a number to me. Upon finishing the project, I feel much closer to the community and feel I have made a huge contribution to the success of the Kianyaga Research Office and Gpower, since they have been striving to analyze their baseline for a long time.

Thats about it in terms of work for the last month. I will keep updating now every week to share more of my experiences, challenges, successes, and travels. I plan to go on a safari in 2 weeks, then climb mount Kenya, and go to Lamu, a small arabic island off the north east coast of Kenya.

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