Blending Objectives between Humanitarian Actors and the Private Sector in Refugee Hosting Areas

Over the last thirty years, Kakuma, which hosts one of Africa’s largest refugee camps has grown from a tiny settlement to a medium sized city. But the economy has not had a chance to develop normally. This is because the economy has developed under the umbrella of international aid while trying to satisfy an increasing labour force, growing consumer market and growing productivity. Humanitarian and development agencies have fuelled growth, but at the same time left the market unpredictable and inorganic.

The humanitarian community first came to Kakuma with the sole purpose of protecting the refugees. The mandate of UNHCR, the agency leading and co-ordinating majority of the humanitarian interventions in the region is still primarily considered a protection agency. It is important to note that Kakuma is still rightly considered to be an emergency context and in any such context, there are populations that require protection first before any other form of integrated development.

However, while Kakuma finds itself in an emergency context, it is also now a severely protracted displacement situation. A while ago humanitarian agencies began planning for the people who live in Kakuma to start living lives like everyone else around the world. That is, assuming that if Kakuma is a vibrant town, then the living standards should improve and grow in line with other urban settlements around the world.

In an open market, innovators try to make lives better for everyone through their interventions and investments and generate a range of rewards for themselves at the same time. In the last five years the humanitarian community has begun to sell the idea on a global level that with the right kind of investment, the private sector could improve the living conditions in Kakuma through commercially viable enterprises. The basis for this is that Kakuma and its environs are inhabited by around 300,000 people who are either directly or indirectly engaged in its local economy. Most of the inhabitants have a vested interest in the integrated development of the locality.

Recent studies on economic opportunities available in Kakuma and Kalobeyei say that predictable and organic economic growth in Kakuma will be based on the availability of natural resources in combination with the huge potential in the labour force. Agriculture and high labour intensity industries will leverage off these factors. Successful enterprises will include a combination of both, such as value-adding to agricultural products. Examples of this include tanneries using livestock hides and designing leather products, or tinning locally grown vegetables such as peas and tinned tomatoes. These enterprises will become opportunities for refugees to increase their incomes and eventually become self-reliant and contribute to the host country economy. There are already numerous examples of refugees breaking through economic barriers, supporting themselves and their families with home-grown businesses, and participating in the growth of the local economy.

According to UNHCR and the academic studies, the private sector should be ready and willing to invest in both the consumer market as well as productivity in Kakuma and Kalobeyei. However, so far, the private sector has not really taken up this call and almost no deeply researched investment-ready business plans have been outlined that take into account the distortions and challenges present within Kakuma’s economy as a result of the town and camp’s inorganic, aid-dependent growth.

Kakuma’s story is being played out around the region, such as in Uganda and Rwanda where refugees have freedom of movement, freedom to work and in most cases have been provided with land that offers more in the way of productivity than Kakuma’s. Yet private sector investors have been slow to invest in refugee hosting areas and site numerous barriers to doing business there. Firstly, distorted economies have led to complicated power dynamics, with examples of local actors monopolising services and setting up cartels. Local administrative leaders hold an unusual interest in business going on in refugee settlements because of the power they hold over physical access to the space, both of refugees and investors. Secondly, they site need for large scale investments that will improve ease of doing business in refugee hosting areas. Large scale irrigation schemes, access to power, and improved roads are examples of this. Refugee hosting areas are generally very remote and far from existing import/export hubs or major commercial centres. Connected to this third reason sited is that while refugee hosting areas might be commercially viable, the private sector looks at the most commercially viable location for any given project when making investment decisions. On that basis refugee hosting areas must put forth a comparative advantage over other locations in the region and this is often difficult. A fourth reason is connected with the workforce. After taking into account all of the above, the private sector fear that refugee population does not have the requisite skill levels to engage in business and more alarmingly, that after decades of a dependency culture they will lack the motivation needed for successful enterprise.

To address these barriers the humanitarian sector will continue to play a role, beyond that of providing protection. While the national governments take on more responsibility for refugee hosting areas, there is a need for streamlined lobbying for more transparent power dynamics within refugee hosting areas. The humanitarian community, using organic business growth success stories as examples, will be the key player advocating for these large scale investments. Moreover, the humanitarian community will still be relied on to educate and prepare the population with skills that respond to the demands of the emerging organic economy.

Most importantly, thorough business plans will have to be conducted taking into account these barriers not just focusing on the opportunities. We have found that deeply researched business plans bring out these barriers clearly without providing concrete answers to how to reduce the barriers in the short term. The barriers are complex and so instead these business plans must lay out a range of strategies that may or may not be successful, and an approach of design, iteration and analysis.

In this context any company, implementer or investor going into a refugee hosting area should have a long term view and an eye for blended outcomes between pure market-based opportunities while still learning and playing the role of protecting and building the capacity of the vulnerable population. We have found that investors who support this approach exist, but to bring them in the language has to change from diving straight in with the “commercial viability” narrative. A community of actors who can build the dialogue between the protection focused humanitarian sector and the commercially focused private sector has been the missing piece until now. There is an emerging group of agencies, companies and investors willing to play this role and I believe the time has come to bring them together so that they can greater understand the role they play and path to achieving success. This could possibly take the form of a network or working group, a series of conferences or meet-ups, and alliance of like-minded actors, or even a tightly-knit consortium. Any thoughts welcome.

A Transparent Cryptocurrency for Development / Humanitarian Funding?

2017 was the year in which Bitcoin became mainstream, and my grandmother and delivery man started talking about it. (Not literally – my grandmother turns her TV off at the wall because she’s afraid of the remote control – it’s an English idiom). As a teacher/NGO worker I’m not an expert on cryptocurrency but I watch the Blockchain TED talks and have done my share of guessing who Satoshi Nakamoto might be.

Those of you who know more might be able to help me on an idea I have that could be applied to the non-profit sector, to see if it is in the pipeline already or has serious pitfalls. I know that people in the industry are experimenting with how Ethereum and Bitcoin could be used in humanitarian funding, but I'm not convinced they are the best currencies for it.

There are now literally thousands of cryptocurrencies, each with different attributes. Nearly all are based in some way on the concept of the blockchain ledger. Many have gained market value through selling points such as fast transactions times, anonymity and being under the radar of regulation.  Coins have gained their own value against the dollar and as such have become investment opportunities – for better or worse.

Due to the ledger system everyone using the system would have access to the entire history of that currency if it wasn’t for encryption - but for every coin I have found so far the system has ingenious ways of encrypting this information so that it is hidden and unhackable. This makes sense –for a large crypto currency it would not be beneficial for everyone on the ledger to be able to see the details of every transaction ever made using that currency. We should sometimes be free to make payments without other people knowing. What if we want to give an anonymous donation, tip someone, or buy cream for athlete’s foot?

But is there a currency that can make sections or chains of the ledger completely open and transparent? Let’s call the potential coin altcoin, since there is probably an altcoin that does this, and give a few examples of how this could be beneficial.

·         A small savings group in a community (SACCO) convert their fiat currency into altcoin and all transactions are done on an open ledger, including loans and repayments. Accounting is no longer necessary as every transaction is visible to anyone who wants to look.

·         An agency like Xavier Project wants to raise funds to build a classroom. We launch an appeal requesting altcoin from our donors. The donors donate altcoin into our altcoin wallet and the transactions go onto the ledger. We procure contractors who all demonstrate that they use altcoin in their transactions. We pay the contractors to build the classroom in altcoin and they pay their staff and buy supplies using altcoin. The original donors are able to see every transaction, and really see how much Xavier Project and the contractor are keeping as their cut.

·         Imagine the benefit of this where there are multiple layers of donors, contractors and subcontractors. The cement supplier in the example above gets his funds from the contractor, who gets her funds from Xavier Project, who get their funds from UNHCR, who get their funds from the US Government, who get their funds from US taxpayers. Donors would be able to see where their money is going, and as of now they would be able to see how much gets absorbed (wasted?) by intermediary agencies.

·         Donors could then be better informed as to where they are giving their money and the function of some intermediaries would be questioned. In the short term agencies and contractors offering this level of transparency would gain more support and grow rather than lose significance. In the longer term their role in transferring material value could fade. (XP would love this by the way – we could evolve to disbursing only intellectual value rather than material value, and let the material value flow directly from donor to beneficiary.)

·         Use of cryptocurrency in this value chain could reduce transaction costs to negligible amounts, which would be particularly significant with international transactions – up to 7% of the original donation amount could be saved.  

·         The open ledger system could also cut huge expenses for the agencies as they would need a far reduced finance team. Programme team members would no longer have to worry about getting receipts for every single payment, a job which is even more laborious than it sounds with all the accompanying paperwork that must go with it. Our full-time team spend at least 35% of their time on work surrounding transactions in some way. I would estimate that if we used an open ledger system across the organisation it could cut this down to 10% thus saving 25% of man-hours.

The channels and extent of openness would have to be made clear. The ideal may be to have “giving chains” hosted by an agency which is open to everyone on that giving chain. For example, if UNHCR wants to achieve outcomes of education for refugees, they set up an open giving chain on the ledger whereby everyone who gives or receives on that ledger can see the full ledger. Xavier Project could also host multiple giving chains that can be seen by everyone on that chain. The degree of openness could be a pre-requisite for contracting agencies or suppliers, so they will know how much they will be expected to share before they are selected, as will everyone else on that giving chain – so a level of anonymity or privacy at any stage can be an option as long as it is clear in advance.

One thing most actors on this value chain would fear, from donor, to institutional agency, to NGO to contractor, is the volatility of most crypto currencies at the moment. I don’t see this changing at least in the next decade.  Currently coins can lose or gain 50% of their value in day. Therefore the best altcoin for this concept would be one which is pegged to the US Dollar. There are several  examples of this such as Ziftr, CoinUSD and Nubit, but it seems the most successful one so far has been Tether. Tether has managed to maintain 1:1 USD value pretty much since its launch in 2015.

A pegged cryptocurrency would mean that if a donor buys said altcoin to donate to the chain of giving, it will not lose or gain value before it finally gets to the cement provider or labourer a few months later.

So what we need is a cryptocurrency that is pegged to the dollar and that has a ledger that can be transparent to varying degrees. Does it exist?

Xavier Project's Cultures

In my last blog I wrote about how important it is for an agency to have an identity as a team. This is a team of people who share a belief in a different future that they believe is possible to bring about. They share a belief in the best approaches that should be used to bring that future about. These approaches can also just be cultures, or ways of behaving that unite a group of people into a team whose whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

At Xavier Project we are united by our core value, which is solidarity. I have written about solidarity in the past in this blog http://odieromondi.blogspot.co.ke/2015/08/solidarity-xavier-projects-core-value.html. Our core value permeates all our cultures and approaches but we also focus on three pillars that summarise our organisational cultures. These are “open”, “cohesive” and “pioneering”. We chose them because these are  words that other people use to describe us, but we could also be a lot more open, cohesive and pioneering so we focus on them as cultures we would like to display more fully.

Open

The culture of being open is heavily inspired by our core value of solidarity, in that we can’t show solidarity with each other, with the refugees we work with and all other stake holders without being open. We are known for always having an open door to refugees and being accessible to people who need our help or want to partner with us. The word “open” also signifies our belief that societies around the world should be more open to refugees fleeing conflicts, famines or extreme poverty – the phrase open doors therefore has a twin meaning for us.

However, the culture of being open has implication at other levels as well. We have been congratulated by donors for the transparency in our reporting and the accuracy in our financial accounting. We are also keen to be open-minded to new ideas and ready to listen to anyone’s ideas of how to be more creative, be they full-time team members or others.

Cohesive

The culture of cohesion is inspired by the ideas in my last blog about “agency” http://odieromondi.blogspot.co.ke/2017/08/on-agency.html . It is vital that a team should be united in its vision and way of doing things if it wants to make a change and we foster a culture of focusing on this cohesion within the team.  We have ways of doing things that we believe are the Xavier Project way, such as leading by example, communicating clearly and effectively, taking responsibility, and mentoring others in the team. But cohesion to us does not mean that we all need to be robots operating on identical lines of code – in fact as part of our culture of being one team with a shared vision we welcome diversity; diversity of opinions, diversity of background and diversity of individual ambitions. In fact more than welcome, we encourage team members to employ their individual flair in their programmes and urge people to pursue interests that might not immediately line-up with our work plan, whether during or outside of work hours.

Pioneering

In the long run this diversity gives us a team that has a far broader understanding of the core and the peripheries of the context we are working and a team that can come up with more colourful ways of addressing age-old problems. To be pioneering in the work we do we need to understand the gaps in our sector and the things that are being tried elsewhere that could work in our context. This means we all need to be willing to research and to learn. It means we have to accept we can be wrong, and ready to be flexible and adapt our programmes according to the need and to the potential. A great example of this is our Tamuka department. Tamuka means speak out in Swahili and in 2012 we opened Tamuka as a platform for refugees to speak out about the realities of their lives. It was an idea that came from the refugee community, but about a year after we launched we realised that refugees were more interested in using Tamuka to learn and to engage in their societies, not necessarily to use it as a platform to promote their rights. Today Tamuka has evolved into the department that runs the Community Enterprise Cycle as described here http://odieromondi.blogspot.co.ke/2017/01/xavier-projects-community-enterprise.html .

Most importantly, to be pioneering in our sector you need to be resilient knowing you will consistently come against barriers that seem to be unsurmountable and problems that appear to be infinitely complex. People have tried to solve these problems before and failed, so if we are to succeed we need to be radical. Being radical nearly always means you have to be unpopular with someone and it can be exhausting so you need a lot of energy. At Xavier Project we have come up with numerous radical ideas, such as our iGCSE project and our community run hubs, but a challenge with having a culture of always coming up with new ideas is that we need to be better at completing our ideas and seeing them all the way through to the  

Power and Fragile Peace

One of the deputy leaders stood up at the peace rally today and berated the previous speakers for not thanking the President first and before all other actors for the successes we were celebrating. It was because of his bravery as a warrior that we have peace in the country, we were told, and he has spread peace and continues to spread peace throughout the land.

Outside of East Africa our leaders are not given a great time in the press. Self-proclaimed “mature democracies” are full of scorn for countries where votes are bought, not cast based on policy, and often miscounted. They assume that because the current regime is corrupt the elections must have been rigged, because there is no way over 50% of the adult population would have chosen to keep a despot in power.

But they don’t see the drip-drip effect of propaganda that the majority of voters are fed. If they did, they would see that most people have been made to love the status quo, and, I believe, vote it back in with a legitimate majority, even taking into account the impact of blatant election rigging.

Everything today was framed into a hierarchical prism, and there was a constant feeling that this was all happening under the watchful and encouraging eye of the President. The minister for development in this province was the ‘guest of honour’ and left to speak last, but when he spoke he mainly deferred to the President and brought things back to how great things are because of him. In his light, we sang the national anthem twice (once at the beginning and once at the end), and presents were even donated to the minister, to take back to the President and his wife in the capital – as a thank you.

This may sound like it was contrived, but it was supported by various underlying layers of hierarchy, which acted as a prop to this ultimate Presidential hierarchy, and as such were no less significant. For example, the three hours of speeches, although made in the presence of the children and reformed warriors who should surely have been the audience, were made in English and literally addressed to the minister. When I say literally, I mean most speakers paused mid-sentence nearly every minute to say “guest of honour Mr Minister”. Naturally, the minister was given a special chair, right in the middle of the top table and was always served everything first. When he spoke, a solder stood behind him holding an umbrella to guard him from the sun – a privilege that was exclusively available to the minister, despite the soldier standing idle for most of the day.

The minister had to leave early, so the deputy I referred to at the beginning moved into the big chair and motioned everyone to his right to move on chair closer towards him- they had all just received a hierarchical promotion.

It is this worship of hierarchy, enacted without a hint of irony, that the hundreds of children present today witness on a daily basis. Of course, they very rarely if ever see the President, but if his representatives are treated this way, think what kind of a god he himself must be. He is important and as they are always told, it is because of him that there is peace and because of him that the road was tarmacked and the hospital built. It would take a lot to see through all that and question his ability to rule, or care about the rumours of cleptocracy – even if they ever hear them in the first place.

This is why they all vote for him. The question would be- who out of the officials believe this propaganda and who is acting out some self-preserving and self-promoting game? It’s hard to tell because in this tightly centralised power structure you have no choice but to play the tune if you want to stay in your coveted position of power.  However, after seeing it for myself I believe it is genuine here and this is something foreigners also don’t understand. This region has seen a lot of unrest in recent generations, and the strong leader has brought peace [did he arguably fuel or even cause the war in the first place? Topic for another day]. Looking at neighbouring countries it is too easy to see what can happen when the state is weak, and even in the model(ish) democracy next door, the state is too weak to control rampant crime, tribal conflict and land invasions. Development can only happen if there is peace, and it is only after realising how fragile peace is across the whole of East Africa and how horrific the opposite can be, that you appreciate it when it is there, however (un)democratically it may have been achieved. 

Kakumopolis

As we walked into the cramped office David from Vodafone Foundation told Jessy to turn on the air-con. She had been sitting in a room that could just about fit one person but she was sharing it with David and two large whirring servers that were contributing more to the heat than the sun above the tin roof. With us now in the room as well it was too crowded to close the door so I had cool air on one side of my face competing with the hot dusty air that occupies the rest of Kakuma Refugee Camp 365 days a year.

Jessy is a Congolese girl living in Kakuma Refugee Camp who learnt to code within a month and is now making money over the internet. Most people would be surprised by this on various levels but after spending time in Kakuma not many stories I hear about it surprise me anymore. Thousands of children have arrived unaccompanied in Kakuma (or the border reception post) in the last twenty years who have been walking for twenty days through waterless terrain.  Hearing their accounts it is impossible to understand how they survived. One of these survivors is now an athlete who just missed selection for the Olympics. When I met him he had achieved his current personal best of 1.04 in the half marathon, despite it being the first time he had run the exact distance. The world record is 58 minutes and he hopes to improve on his PB when he finally gets a pair of running shoes to replace his plimsolls. Another refugee girl, who had been learning in tents in severely overcrowded classrooms, recently scored high enough marks in her primary leaving exams to put her in the top 1% students in the entire country. So when David told us that Jessy had only been introduced to computers a couple of months earlier and had learnt to code within the last month I had no reason to doubt it. Kakuma draws in super-humans who do remarkable things that you can’t compare with the achievements of non-Kakuma muggles.

Yiech Pur Biel - Olympic 800m Runner from Kakuma

Kakuma should no longer be referred to as a camp of refuge, but a remote hotbed of bursting potential. Kakuma will always be hot, but will it always be remote? Sure it is in the middle of nowhere, but so were Nairobi and Milton Keynes not so long ago. Kakuma has a population of 185,000 people with varying degrees of super-human powers and a teenage median age. For them Kakuma is the centre of their world and they will make it what they want it to be, and one day the rest of the world will wake up to what that means and come knocking for a piece of it. Blink and you will miss the dawn of the Kakumopolis.

Back to the real world - currently, the economy of Kakuma is weak and distorted. The three traditional sources of external income for the camp include in-flows from NGO’s and intergovernmental agencies, remittances from relatives abroad, and trading between refugees and the local Turkhana tribe as well as truckers on their way to South Sudan. This income then revolves around the camp making some people quite successful through retail, services and other forms of internal commerce. Cash goes out as imports come in and quality of life improves – a bit.

NGO’s are the biggest employer of refugees in the camp, employing 27% of all refugees who claimed to have employment (including self-employment). This may sound good but they all pay a universally accepted $60 per month per person, and each refugee is only allowed one such job at a time for fear of being black-listed by all the agencies.

M-pesa agents in Kakuma estimate that 100,000 – 150,000 USD per month is received in Kakuma from remittances abroad. This is good and there is an element of filtering down and around of that money, but it gives some an unfair advantage and distorts natural competition.

Having 185,000 people in one place inevitably means that there are skills and services available for locals or people passing through. A good example is hair and beauty services – there are a number of famous salons in Kakuma that are used by many non-refugees. Nine out of ten of the abattoirs in the region are in Kakuma refugee camp, and Turkana bring their livestock from far and wide to be slaughtered and butchered. However, Turkana is the poorest county in Kenya with over 50% of the population living in extreme poverty (under $1.25 per day) and with a population density of 11 people per square km tapping into Turkana’s economy is not going to bring about Kakumopolis any time soon.

So as it stands, the median income for families in Kakuma camp is $73 per week, with typical families spending almost $20 per week on food and almost $15 servicing debts. The levels of poverty faced by households in Kakuma can be seen in the behaviour of 43% of families who employ immediately harmful coping mechanisms such as spending entire days without eating, and 57% of families who employ potentially harmful coping mechanisms such as taking out loans with interest to pay for food.

However, there are opportunities for the economy of Kakuma to become more efficient and more integrated with external markets and start its long journey towards Kakumopolis. For refugees to benefit from this integration the education they receive must be more relevant to the skills needed for sustainable livelihoods. Since access to formal education remains a significant obstacle, alternative forms of education need to link refugees with these opportunities more directly (this is where Xavier Project comes in).

A report carried out by Samuel Hall on behalf of UNHCR implementing partners, DRA and AAH has identified various opportunities and laid out recommendations for exploring them.^[1] For example, the report states that too many products are imported into the camp (such as desks) that could be produced in the camp if refugees were equipped with the relevant skills in a more economically efficient way. It gives examples of exports from the camp, such as animal hides, that could yield higher profits if refugees were better trained and equipped to add value to these products before they left the camp. It suggests that better access to capital might facilitate this. Finally, it identifies various ways in which refugees can link with external markets, including online markets. A report by AMGlobal Consulting on Telework for refugee communities outlines current organisations promoting telework opportunities for refugees and recognises best practices.^[2] Jessy Inga may not know it but she marks the beginning of an era of Kakuma generating income through external markets via the internet.

Kakuma Refugees: Connected

Based on these findings and recommendations Xavier Project hopes to launch an innovative plan based on a community-run hub concept; a concept that we have been developing since 2012 in Nairobi and Kampala that will reduce poverty amongst refugees and enable refugees to live dignified lives while contributing positively to Kenya’s economy. It’s known as the Community Enterprise Cycle and is based on the premise that refugee run education and enterprise will lead to refugees engaging in their new communities and integrating in new markets. People like Jessy will not only be able to scale their own successes, but they will rely on the resources available in their own community to succeed and amplify their social impact in the process and the cycle will continue. On the current trajectory, refugees in Kakuma, through their industriousness and natural talent will tap into global gaps and become world leaders in niche areas that we cannot yet predict. They will be bringing income into the country and creating employment. Will Kenya still refer to this new Kakuma as a burden on their society, or an asset?

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^[1] Samuel Hall Comprehensive Market Assessment for Kakuma Refugee Programmes 2016. Data on livelihoods in this section was taken from this report.

^[2] AMGlobal Telework and Opportunity: Approaches to Employment in Refugee Camps and other Underserved Populations January 2016

Ugali, Spuds and Fiddles - our cultures are borrowed so be prepared to share them

When asked to imagine an Englishman many of us will think of a man dressed in pyjamas drinking a cup of tea. An Irishman would typically play the fiddle after completing a meal of potatoes. In Kenya, a traditional thing to do is eat ugali and chapattis. However, none of these activities would have been possible a few centuries ago. Tea only arrived in England in the 1660’s and pyjamas even later; violins were invented in Mongolia and potatoes came from America; and ugali is made from maize which has been in Africa for no more than 500 years and even less in Kenya, while chapattis (which many Kenyans believe are their own invention) came from India. Lonely Planet makes its money by giving you the tips on how to live like a local while a lot of the time these 'cultures' are simply a result of globalisation.

Food, clothing and musical instruments were only able to move around because people moved around with them. The migrant Walter Raleigh was responsible for bringing the potato to Europe (and incidentally the cassava which eventually ended up in Africa as an ‘indigenous’ crop) and King Charles II claimed responsibility for the tea landing in England. The Arab traders no doubt introduced chapattis to Kenya and I have no clue how the Mongolians managed to get their violins to Ireland but somehow it happened and in the right hands it is a quintessentially Irish instrument.

This was not through pre-historic migration of peoples, but all that happened in the last 500 years, and within the same time frame the movement of people had a large impact on language, culture and even genetic make-up of ethnic groups. When the potato crop failed in Ireland in 1848 (why haven’t more people blamed Walter Raleigh for the Irish famine?) and millions of people fled the country as ‘economic migrants’ they were received with mixed reactions all over the world but eventually managed to integrate with almost no lasting exceptions. 165 years later that migration crisis has been largely forgotten, even by those directly descended from them – a good proportion of the members of racist organisations in England have indisputably Irish names.

The Luo tribe in Kenya have names and a language identical to Nilotic tribes in northern Uganda, and can compare names and words with tribes as far away as Sudan and Ethiopia. They arrived in Kenya in the 1500’s having negotiated the Nile and Lake Victoria and they finally settled on the shores of the lake near land that was already populated by other Bantu tribes, now known as Luhya and Kisii. It is not known how they were received at first but tradition and folklore in the area documents  co-operation between the Nilots and the Bantu, especially in terms of shared skills, resources and wives. The Luo were good fishermen and herdsmen while the Bantus were agriculturalists so there was an obvious trade-off, and though politicians have tried divide and rule tactics no-one has succeeded in turning Luo and Luhya against each other to this day. Meanwhile many of their traditions have merged together as for several hundred years Luo have been farming and the Luhya herding and fishing.

When I walk around rural Luo lands in Kenya I am made to feel quite foreign – not in an aggressive way but very superficially - simply in the sense that I am a topic of interest just because of the colour of my skin. Some people make (very repetitive) jokes as I walk past, others stare at me with wide-eyed fascination and some pester me for money. Under the surface I feel very welcomed though and never feel threatened or that I am a threat. I wonder how easy it would be to integrate a culture as a foreign as mine into a community like that nowadays in the way they integrated over the last 500 years with the Bantu tribes. Certainly, while I am more unusual, it must be a far better experience for me to walk around Western Kenya, than for a western Kenyan to wander around Europe not knowing whether the stares he or she is receiving are welcoming, interested or threatening, because the chances are they could be any of those.  Through this experience I believe it would be much easier for cultural diversity to spread in a place like Western Kenya if the conditions were right, and I don’t foresee the same defensiveness over cultures that we see in other parts of the world. I also think that just as cultural integration between the Nilots and Bantus in the past few centuries was good for both parties, more diversity would benefit everyone (and I’m talking globally now) because we all have positive aspects of our heritage to share with others. Along the way we may lose a few quirks like drinking tea or playing the fiddle, but chances are they were borrowed in the first place.

Experiences in Recruitment for Queen’s Young Leaders Seminar

I have offered to run a session on ‘recruitment’ for the QYL programme but while it is designed for people involved in recruiting to a small organisation, it could also be useful for someone trying to join a similar organisation as an employee. I do not have years of experience in recruitment as I have only been an employer for four years and now I only employ about 28 people but during Xavier Project’s history people have joined our team through very many avenues, from just being my old friend to passing gruelling two hour interviews.

Here are a few things to think about before even starting the process:

1.       The golden rule of recruitment – make sure you like them.

This is by far the most important thing about choosing a new member of your team. It doesn’t matter how experienced or skilled the candidate is, if you think your personalities will clash it will not work.

 2.    Select on potential and not necessarily on experience

This is connected to the last point. If you really like the candidate and they seem to be keen then it is likely that they will be able to learn the necessary technical skills to do the job. What is more, employees will be far more motivated to learn if they are a little bit out of their comfort zone. In my opinion one of the most motivating factors for a lot of people is feeling that they are being trusted with a responsibility that is slightly too big for them, because they want to see and then prove that they are able to deal with it. Most people are also very motivated by learning new things and in the back of their mind they will be hoping to gain skills on each job which will make them more marketable in the future. Engagement in a role, as long as the employee is not seriously incompetent, is far more important than technical skill, because if they are skilled but not engaged they will not use their skills anyway. If they are engaged but not as skilled as they could be they will gain those skills quickly.

3.  ‘Interview’ them to be members of the organisation’s team not for a specific role.

One thing I have learnt to do in the last few years is move people around according to the best fit. In one case this even involved directors of two separate departments literally swapping jobs and leading a totally new team. There are several people in Xavier Project who have tried their hand at various jobs from HR to logistics, admin, operations and finance within the space of a couple of years. You may say this is only relevant to very small organisations, which is true to an extent, but having a full picture of the whole organisation is vital in really understanding the vision and I find that the people who have been pigeonholed less are able to get the bigger picture more easily. They are also the first ones to step in and help out when a key staff member is absent or needs assistance. These are the types of people you really need when you’re starting out so avoid those who will keep referring to their job description or contract and complain when as asked to do something remotely different.

With these thoughts in mind, here are a few tips for when starting the process for looking for someone:

 Be open to various forms of selection process

This is harder for a big organisation that has strict policies on recruitment etc, but when you are still small don’t feel you have to interview every time. This is particularly the case considering the last bullet point – it is not always easy to write a job description for what you are really looking for. For example, I have sometimes just needed an addition to the team who was a solid team player, with no specific background or skills who can work under pressure and deal with some very unusual challenges. How do you write a job description and then interview for that? As a result we have recruited quite a number of ex-volunteers/interns to the team. This has had two main benefits – firstly we know a lot more about the person we are recruiting, and secondly they may have at least some idea about the whacky job you are asking them to do, often for little financial compensation. Most interns and volunteers have no idea initially that you are watching their every move in case they are up for the job and this is another bonus because they are not putting up the facade they could easily pull off in an interview. It is obvious that you can really get to know someone when you are spending hours and hours with them in the work place, and most importantly you get to see how they interact in a team environment – something that is very hard to do in an interview process despite being such a crucial element of the job.

 If you have to interview.... be careful with the JD

If you are going to interview for an important position you need to get as many applicants as possible to give you strength in numbers. We had over 400 applicants for one job and in the end there was only one candidate we were close to hiring (and luckily s/he was outstanding). Had we been more unlucky we would have had to turn everyone down and start again, and if you are not happy this is what you have to do.

• ·         Give yourself time. From posting the job description to having the hired employee in the office will never take less than a month, and often can take two months. You need about two weeks or more for the job to be live on-line, a week for organising the interview, and then the successful applicant will need to give his or her notice.
• ·         Before you send out the job description, make sure you have worked out all the platforms where you can promote it in advance so that it is posted everywhere at around the same time.
• ·         Set up a new email address eg jobs@.... Because otherwise your inbox will be spammed
• ·         Think of ways to filter people out, for example, DO state the salary or at least the salary bracket with 10% variation on each side. This is to avoid someone excellent getting into the interview and then turning down the job because the salary is too low. If you want to renegotiate the salary downwards later because you think you pitched it too high this is not a problem and in my experience the applicants have always accepted.
• ·         Find other tricks to filter, for example, say in the JD that the applicant must explicitly state why they are interested in working with refugees (insert orphans, mobile technology, algebra etc) then when you receive the applications go CONTROL F ‘REFUGEE’ and if they don’t even mention the word don’t read any more. It may sound crazy but in Kenya for a job working with refugees over 80% of the candidates did not mention the word ‘refugee’ in their cover letter (tip for cover letter writing right there).
• ·         The best way to get around this is to set up your own application form, but there are pro’s and con’s to this. It is a lot of work and some websites and agencies might not post them so you will get fewer applications and could maybe miss some hidden gems. 

  The Interviews

Try to dedicate as much time as you can for the interviews. People can surprise you at interview and contradict your expectations of them from the CV and cover letter. If it is a position that you feel really strongly about spend a few days interviewing, this might mean covering 12 – 15 people but it will be worth it to get the right person.

• ·         Get help interviewing. This might be a neutral person or a colleague, but it’s best not to have someone on the panel who will be managed by the successful candidate because it could create uneasiness in the future.
• ·         Give very clear directions and the number of a receptionist etc because people WILL get lost and will be very late. Some will be very early and you can swap them around in that case.
• ·         Allow two hour slots per interview. This is so that you can have a break between each one, because if you interview well they will be draining. Also, an hour goes quickly and you may easily find you go over if you are enjoying it and also if you still need more time to really get to the bottom of something.

When the interview kicks off the interviewee will be nervous. Of all the people I have interviewed there have been very few exceptions to this and that usually meant they didn’t care. With this in mind it can be good to ask a fairly generic question that lets them loosen up. From here on in I recommend that you turn it into a conversation. If you interview well you should try and pick something from what they said in the last answer to move on the next questions, and if not make it clear that it is a definite progression to a new topic (“OK let’s move on to some management questions”). This style will enable the interviewee to relax and open up a lot more than if you ask jolted bullet point questions. Don’t feel constrained to keep to the prompt sheet, let the interview take its own course and let them reveal what really motivates them. In the same vein, make sure you respond positively to their answers – I cannot see any benefit at all in intimidating them and making them feel uncomfortable, even though I know a lot of interviewers do that.

• ·         Make notes make notes. It can be hard to do this and may seem austere, but you WILL forget what they say if you don’t. By the end of the day your mind will be a mush.
• ·         Discuss each candidate immediately after each interview with the other panellists. This can be interesting to see how first impressions can differ but you will also remember those discussions a few days later when making your final decision.
• ·         Then prep up properly on the next candidate before they come in. You will already you feel you know them because you had to short-list them for interview but remind yourself of the crunch questions and the areas of their experience which you want to know more about, and which they will probably want a chance to highlight. 

When the whole process is over, go back to point number one at the top and follow your instincts – your brain will be telling you all sorts of unravelled logic but when you finally make that decision you will not know exactly how you got to it, but make the call and be confident. Tell them you want to offer them the job but that you would like to talk about it in person. Only when it is all tied up should you go and reject the other applicants. Remember that for some people they are interviewing you while you are interviewing them and they may not yet be 100% set on the job so don’t presume that they will take it.

Rejections

One thing I have always done is email each of the other interviewees with an individual message explaining that they did not get the job but stating something that I enjoyed in the interview. This has gone down well and is good easy PR for your organisation as well as being the right thing to do. Then I have written a copy and paste message for the other hundreds who didn’t get invited to interview at all and asked a volunteer to log on the jobs@ email and send it to every single applicant with their name at the top! (I hope none of them are reading this and finding out that it was a copy and paste!) That is an unusual thing to do but it doesn’t take that long and is very well appreciated by people who might have had big hopes of getting the job.

Now you’re ready to get hiring.