A microcredit way to move the poor out of slums

This is a story from last week, but it's a great one about moving people out of the slums of Nairobi. The microcredit firm Jamii Bora Trust is the subject of this Seattle Times article.

One of the products that the Trust offers is a low interest mortgage program. Payments are kept at about the same levels as paying rent in the slums. Once they escape the slums, the people can also easily escape poverty.

Writer Jim Simon visited the village that the Jasmii Bora Trust has built.

On the second night in her new house here, Jane Ngoiri told one of her children to get something out of the kitchen.

Then she started laughing.

"I told them, 'It is us talking about a kitchen. A kitchen!' " recalled Ngoiri, a former prostitute who moved with her four children earlier this year from a rented, one-room shanty in the Nairobi slum of Mathare.

"It's unbelievable."

Kaputei represents an audacious leap for both Ngoiri and the Jamii Bora Trust, a Kenyan microfinance organization that began a decade ago lending 50 women beggars money to start their own businesses.

About 22 miles outside of Nairobi, rows of cinder-block houses topped with red tile roofs spread across the plains — the first stage of a new, self-contained town that Jamii Bora hopes will someday be home to 10,000 people, schools, shops and small industry.

Ngoiri paid 350,000 Kenyan shillings — about $4,500 — for her two-bedroom house with a kitchen, toilet and bath. Her mortgage is around $40 a month — not much more, she says, than what she paid to rent the cramped room in Mathare.

To keep costs down, Jamii Bora is manufacturing the building materials on site, providing jobs to its members and others living nearby. Kaputei is also an eco-town of sorts, with houses powered by solar panels and an ambitious plan to recycle 70 percent of the wastewater through man-made wetlands.

"It's really beyond the wildest imagination of what most microfinance organizations are thinking about," said Ed Bland, who heads Seattle-based Unitus, which provides business and technical expertise and helps raise capital for Jamii Bora and other microfinance groups.

"They are taking on things that others just complain about."

Helping a young women's school in Nairobi

A Catholic Church in California has ties to Nairobi, and uses those connections to help a girls school there. The relationship across borders began in 2002, since then the church has been raising money for the school and the young women who attend it. A nun from Nairobi is currently visiting the church in California to show the parishioners how their fund raising has helped.

Kerana Todorov from the Napa Valley Register writes of how the relationship started and gives us more details on the school. The story of the school can also be found on it's blog. The school needs $600 for each child per year.

The Rev. Pat Stephenson, leader of Holy Family Parish, began to raise money for Kenya’s children in 2002. He visited the country to go on a safari, but was moved by what he saw on Nairobi streets: hundreds of children, including pregnant teens and young mothers, begging in the streets.

When Stephenson told Schneiders of his experience, Schneiders offered to help raise money for Sister Christine. He also agreed to come along on three fact-finding trips to Kenya to find out what the parish could do to help Kenya’s abandoned children.

The trips were not for the faint of heart.

Post-election violence erupted in Kenya shortly before they landed in Nairobi on their most recent trip together, in December 2007. Despite the danger and uncertainty, they returned safely and plan to go back in a year.

The Cardinal Maurice Otunga Empowerment Center for Girls opened in mid-2004 on a property donated by Kenya’s Catholic church, a few months after the Schneiders and Stephenson presented a $5,000 donation from parish members to the Archbishop of Nairobi, Rafael Ndingi.

Stephenson asked that the money be used to help needy children.

About three months later, Sister Christine, a member of the order of the Sisters of the Assumption and a high school teacher by training, proposed to use Holy Family Parish’s donation to open the center for girls.

About 80 girls between the ages of 13 and 19 live at the school for two years. Some arrive suffering from AIDS after turning to prostitution to support their families. Many have been beaten or raped or suffered from homelessness.

At the school, the teens receive counseling and medical care and learn how to sew, cook and knit. They also train in how to use computers and make arts and crafts. The students work in shifts to feed staff and colleagues and maintain the property.