Marafiki Community is a Kenyan NGO founded to improve living conditions in the IDP camp in Maai Mahiu. IDP stands for Internally Displaced People; people who had to flee their houses as a result of the post-election violence in 2007. Marafiki Community’s activities are mainly focused on helping the people at this IDP camp, but also tries to help out in other areas. The founder and owner of this organization, Isaac Mwangi, has always been involved in helping the community. He lives in the outskirts of Nairobi and experiences every day the effects of a rapidly urbanizing society. “I’m simply getting tired,” he says, “of seeing the people who I grew up with getting lost in crime and drugs because of unemployment.” Isaac is working hard to create opportunities for young people next to the commitments he has for his own organization.
So when Isaac was approached by our team with the question what the most pressing needs are in his area, his immediate response was the issue of unemployment. The way in which Isaac believes unemployment can be addressed is through empowering people with ambition to start their own business. Many young people have not been able to finish their education, which means that many lack the skills and resources to start a business. According to Isaac, however, there are many possibilities to start a business regardless of whether someone has an educational background. Especially in the field of woodwork, a field that does not require many specific skills, many promising enterprises have been set up recently. Whether these enterprises are sustainable over the long-run is not yet clear. Therefore, Isaac’s main question for as a minor team is “how can we ensure that a startup is successful and sustainable at the same time?” In order for us to answer this question we need to do research and set up a business plan in which sustainability of the company is key. Isaac then hopes that with the business plan we design, an actual business employing youth from the area can be set up.
From this it becomes clear that Marafiki Community is the organization that indicated the needs of the urban population in Nairobi and provided suggestions of how to address this problem. The organization itself, however, will not be directly tied to the development of the business plan or the establishment of the business. For this reason we aim to contact organizations whose missions relate to our project in order to find out whether there are opportunities for collaboration.