Peacebuilding in Kenya
Christine Habgood-Coote describes friendship between Kenyan and British Quakers
A young Kenyan Quaker, Hanningtone Mucherah, was one of the two Quaker World Relations Committee (QWRC) guests who attended Britain Yearly Meeting at Friends House earlier this year. After Yearly Meeting he spent a few days in our home and visited different Meetings around the country. During his stay he ate and talked with Friends from Lewes, Polegate and Blue Idol Meetings.
Hanningtone Mucherah is currently in paid employment with the American Friends Service Committee. Prior to this he single-handedly set up a small NGO – Quaker Peace Initiatives (QPI) in Kenya.
Every Kenyan election since 2007 has been marred by violence. Quaker Peace Initiatives did a lot of monitoring of the election process in 2017. There are fourteen Yearly Meetings in Kenya and all are now brought together under the umbrella organisation called the Friends Church in Kenya. Each Kenyan Yearly Meeting was asked to offer volunteers and, in total, QPI was involved in coordinating 3,000 monitors during the 2007 election.
Hanningtone Mucherah’s assessment is that the violence that has marred elections in Kenya is the outcome of decades of political manipulation – the political manipulation of ethnic tensions and longstanding grievances over land, over corruption and over inequality.
Young people leaving school and university who find themselves without employment and income are the most vulnerable to being used by politicians as mercenaries in politically motivated ethnic clashes.
I was particularly interested in this assessment of Kenya’s problems as it chimes with much of the work of the Green Olive Trust, a small charity whose trustees include four members of Lewes Meeting.
The Green Olive Trust was started just over ten years ago when a Kenyan Quaker approached a British Friend for financial help to enable young people in Kakamega district to access high school and university education. The economy in Western Kenya is dependent on small-scale farming, with the majority of employment in the informal sector.
A World Bank report of 2005 stated that nearly fifty per cent of Kenya’s rural population lived, at that time, below the poverty line. Some fifty per cent of women in their early twenties are unemployed, compared to twenty per cent of men, and the highest levels of unemployment are amongst those with no education.
One of the Green Olive Trust’s successes has been to encourage students to form a mutually supportive group and to consider how they can use their education to benefit the whole community. A Green Olive student, Lavender, has been working in the QPI office, and it may be that we can build on this link. The core mandate and activities of QPI are based on peacebuilding and conflict transformation at a local, regional and national level. The organisation provides what it describes on its website as ‘a collaborative and coordinating platform for the different efforts of Quaker initiatives in peacebuilding in the country’.
QPI is currently a tiny organisation, but there are plans for the future, including mentorship and training in entrepreneurship for young people and setting up hostels where they can live and work. We hope that our friendship will continue so that we can support Hanningtone Mucherah’s work in Kenya and can benefit from his insights and expertise in our own work with the Green Olive Trust.
