NAIROBI, Kenya, May 17 – Traffic was brought to a standstill in Kibera on Saturday as excitement greeted the arrival of new buses set to be used by SHOFCO Urban Network (SUN) members.
Song and dance was the order of the day as members of the pubic joined the group in welcoming the new ‘babies’ who are set to greatly boost SUN’s activities.
The convoy of hooting motorbikes, cars and buses carrying SHOFCO CEO Kennedy Odede and his family, SUN officials and members had to move at a snail’s pace on their way to Kibera Academy grounds along Karanja Road where the ceremony was being held.
A brainchild of Odede, who started it to unify slum dwellers, SHOFCO Urban Network (SUN) is a grassroots movement that brings together individuals and households through social groups run independently and organises them to actively seek tangible change in their community and society at large.
The group has also been running many football related ventures in the vast Kibera slum area, empowering the youth through sports.
In 2004, Odede bought football equipment for the community, organized tournaments that brought people together and in the process, SHOFCO was born.
Having grown up in Kibera slums and witnessed how his community was marginalised, Odede saw the gap between policy and reality on the ground and came up with SUN as a tool to breach the two using a bottom-up approach.
SUN has a presence in 25 slums in Kenya and counting with over one million members, bringing together individual groups and households.
The movement has created a self-sustaining group savings and loans programme for the members and their immediate families with over 1,100 active saving groups.
As a result, members have a Sacco that has given out Sh100 million in loans to date while they also have SUN-DUKA where members buy goods at a relatively cheaper wholesale price.
SUN has also given rise to a number of women enterprises one of them being making of liquid soap which has become a hot cake since the emergence of Covid-19 in Kenya.
SHOFCO Women’s Empowerment Project (SWEP) is also another arm of SUN that provides business training, support and additional income for women living with HIV in Kibera and Mathare as well as SUN Youth that aims to educate and empower young people from the ages of 18-35.
Over the years, SUN has used its vast network to support initiatives by the government by working closely with the local administration on issues like Huduma Namba registration, National Census and Nyumba Kumi Initiative where the movement assisted in sensitising and mobilising the public on their importance.
Indeed, the local administration was also full of praise for SUN and SHOFCO as a whole.
“I have served in Kibera for 13 years and known SHOFCO for a long time. I want to thank Kennedy for joining communities for development by doing a bottom-up approach. You involve the community in every step and that is how you have been successful. I would like others to embrace this model,” said area Chief Joseph Songa.
SUN members believe the new buses, a state-of-the-art brand new 67-seater and two 34-seaters, will make their activities easy, therefore serving more members of the community unlike before.
SHOFCO’s model of transformation has been embraced by world leaders such as Samantha Power, Director, USAID, who is also part of the Global Alliance for Communities (GAC), a coalition of 150 proximate leaders stretching across the blobe, working on the world’s most pressing challenges.
GAC was launched during the World Communities Forum, organised and hosted virtually by Odede, bringing together global leaders who are driving community-based solutions from March 23-24.
While officially flagging off the buses, Odede termed SUN as evidence of what can happen if you stay together while stressing the need for community leaders to delegate duties.
“At SHOFCO, we don’t discriminate against gender, religion or tribe so be a leader, don’t be everywhere. Let other people work,” said Odede, who was accompanied by his wife Jessica and their son Oscar.
It is this model of leadership that has earned Odede several accolades including the Head of State Commendation (HSC) from President Uhuru Kenyatta last December for his incredible work in Kenyan urban slums during the Covid-19 period, coming less than two months after the Head of State mentioned him during his Mashujaa Day celebration speech on October 20 in Kisii County.
The SHOFCO boss then went to warn members of the community against putting politics ahead of development.
“We don’t have political ambitions. We don’t care which party or candidate you support, what we care about is which kid is not going to school and why, how can people access healthcare, who has food, water and many more,” he added.
Odede, whose organisation’s gender department has handled 2,060 cases of GBV since Covid-19 started, took a swipe at members of the community who are propagating these incidents.
“Stop early marriages, stop Gender-Based Violence so that our community can go far. Be better than your generation. Let us be a symbol of hope and unity,” he said.
His wife Jessica stressed that message. She said: “If we come together, we can go far as a community. Let us embrace what Kennedy is doing so that this organisation becomes stronger and stronger.”
Odede has a big network globally and this was confirmed by Pete Ouko, founder Crime Si Poa, and Lancent Clinics founder Dr Ahmed Kalebi who tried starting a clinic in Kibera without success before Odede took over the project and got it up and running.
“We should learn to share ideas and not be selfish. When I was starting Crime Si Poa, it is Kennedy who directed me to potential sponsors abroad and now four years straight, we are benefiting and helping young people from the slums to avoid crime,” said Ouko.
SUN is just one of the many arms of SHOFCO with Level Three hospitals in Kibera and Mathare as well as girls’ schools in the two slums among the others. The three buses will therefore be key in not only helping members of the community to attend events such as graduations, weddings and funerals but will also assist the hospitals as well as schools.
“These buses will help our students go for symposiums, tours and games without delay unlike before,” said Julia Alubala, Head of Curriculum at SHOFCO’s Schools for Girls, where the Kibera school just recorded a record-breaking mean score of 349 with 100 per cent pass among all their 22 KCPE candidates of 2020 where three got 400 marks and above.
