March 17, 2023 – Wote City, Makueni County, Kenya – Today was the first session of the first School for Community-led Development in Africa! Hear from the Director for Citizen Engagement and public participation, Zipporah Wambua:
These women and men are no ordinary government officers. Most were hired specifically to implement the citizen participation mandate under Kenya’s 2010 constitution, which began implementation in 2014. They were hired for their facilitation skills, in many cases honed by years of service in civil society, and for their passion for their people.
In this first session, they “co-created” and deepened their ownership of the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (most of them actually knew many of them by heart already). They co-created the list of skills they and grassroots civil society actors will need to deliver the S4CLD to everyone – from members of the county assembly to activists who rarely step outside their village.
There are enormous challenges facing the people of Makueni, and they did exercises (which they will recreate locally) to identify the Status of the SDGs locally and the most pressing issues in each area.
They also explored how devolution and citizen engagement have moved “up the ladder” from manipulation and tokenism towards real citizen control.
The homework for this session is to profile the 25 civil society groups in their ward who will be their first students. Thus in the near term they envision creating this transformative opportunity for at least 750 community leaders.
They also gave we, their staff, homework — fleshing out the curriculum manuals per input from today, creating a strategy for ensuring the full buy-in of various agencies and the County Assembly, as well as “marketing materials” to enroll civil society actors to invest their time in this effort.
Ten short comments from our trainers
Stay turned for more exciting news from Makueni County!