Charities in Student Fundraising Forum-James Haughton

Dig Deep travelled down to London yesterday for the inaugural Forum meeting for charities engaged in student fundraising. It was a fantastic afternoon which brought together 9 charities in the sector. The conversation flowed and it soon transpired that our interests and the challenges we face were replicated across all of the organisations.

Amongst the attendees were Childreach International, Meningitis Research Foundation, AICR, Hope for Children, The Children's Society, Action Against Hunger, Practical Action, Breast Cancer Campaign and Dementia UK.

One of the most consistent aspects of the meeting was the extent to which the organisations involved were focused upon making the experience of students that fundraise for us as mutually positive as possible. It was clear that everyone strives to improve. Dig Deep relies upon our dedicated student volunteers for much of our funding and we are really excited to be able to share and learn with other charities. This is something charities must do more of across all areas of their operations. 

Dig Deep proposed the idea originally as a platform for sharing best practice and information about the sector and were delighted that pretty much every charity that was approached were keen to join in. We look forward to having some new organisations join at the next meeting hosted and chaired by Dementia UK.

The Forum adopted a set of aims and objectives which included the desire to improve recognition for all of the amazing work that student fundraisers make happen for us. It is under recognised amidst the prevailing cynical conception of a disinterested youth generation portrayed in public media. We thank you all for the incredible energy and drive you bring to Dig Deep and for the wonderful projects that save lives and break cycles of needless poverty in Kenya. You are the future of philanthropy.

Periods of change -by Anna Banyard

I really enjoy provoking men by talking about menstruation. I love being able to talk openly about menses and warning others to tread carefully around me during that ‘time of the month’ because the hormones can make me act deranged and frightening.

Even today in England there is a stigma associated with periods. Some men respond: ‘don’t talk about it Anna, it’s not sexy’ or ‘if you’re going to continue to talk about this I’m going to have to leave’. Maybe my delight in the discussion is a product of going to a girls-only secondary school, or maybe it’s a result of receiving adequate information growing up, teaching me it’s a normal sign of becoming a woman, and something to be proud of. I know men know that menstruation exists too, so me telling them I’m bleeding from my womb isn’t anything that should surprise them (even if it does scare them a bit).

Many girls in Kenya, suffer much more from the stigma surrounding menstruation due to a lack of information, cultural taboos, and a lack of resources to adequately manage it.

There are many factors impairing girls’ education in Kenya. Some of these factors include early marriage, often because families need the dowry to ease financial stress, a lack of family planning and contraception resulting in early and unplanned pregnancy and gender roles in the family requiring female members of the household to be responsible for cleaning, cooking, collecting water, providing firewood and looking after younger children. In addition, girls in many areas of Kenya are pressured to undergo female circumcision to varying degrees of severity.  On top of all this they must manage their periods as well!?

Menstruating for most school girls living in rural Kenya is difficult and problematic, to say the least. Without the necessary finances to access the safe and hygienic products on the market, they use whatever they can find: rags, cotton wool, tissues, and newspaper scraps. Some girls have no access to any of these things at all, and so use soil, leaves, grass, dried animal hides or simply nothing at all. While these methods are uncomfortable and most unhygienic, all are ineffective. Because of the shame and bullying numerous girls experience from their peers when they leak on to their chairs and uniforms, many stop participating or stay home from school. This amounts to girls missing approximately 10-20 percent of school days each year, leading to a major decrease in school performance and grades.

The lack of information these girls have available to them means they have questions not only just about how to take care of themselves, but also about what is normal, what’s happening to my body, and what it means?

Dig Deep in collaboration with our partner organisation WASH United have included a Menstrual Hygiene Management syllabus in a comprehensive Water, Sanitation and Hygiene programme targeting schools in Western Rift Valley, Kenya. We run workshops with young adolescent women to provide a platform of information sharing, demystify the menstrual cycle, understand body and mood changes during puberty, to know what products are available, how to use them hygienically and dispose of them correctly, and why girls should be proud to be women. Another goal of the workshops is to open discussions with boys, asking on their understanding of menstruation and normal adolescent changes in themselves as well as their female peers.

The workshop is done using a range of interactive activities and participatory games. We use a giant female reproductive system diagram to explain the anatomy (which looks weirdly like an angry cow face), show the stages of the menstrual cycle through an interactive calendar, and make bead necklaces with red and yellow beads to represent the menstrual cycle and help girls plan for their next flow.

We also invite external social enterprises with appropriate products that are renewable, reusable, low cost, environmentally conscious and hygienic to inform the girls of solutions that are accessible and preferable, that can keep the girls feeling secure enough to come to school all month round. The training is both fun and informative, which helps to effectively engage participants and ensure that information is well understood and memorable. We also focus on making the girls feel comfortable and safe. Even male teachers or facilitators are given names like Florence or Grace and asked about whether he prefers menstrual cups or tampons. By the end of the training, full of laughter and learning, many of the girls realize how much they like talking openly (sometimes graphically) about our flows, our personal tsunamis in our knickers.

Marketing dilemma's - by James Haughton

In the past few weeks I have been thinking a lot about Dig Deep and our marketing. Marketing sounds like a dirty word in our sector but charity revolves around the need to garner donations and maintain awareness. Neither requires secret strategies of manipulation(!) so I wanted to share with you something that we are giving a lot of thought to right now. It is a dilemma that a lot of charities have to face in presenting their work. 

The scales of the problems are breathtaking in Kenya and there is real human suffering. Presenting images of such suffering has worked for charities for a long time but doesn’t fit with our ethos. How can we present messages about Kenya and the work that we do without resorting to worst case portrayals of the situation there and imposing the narrow lens of our needs as an organisation and donor community?

We would never entertain here in the UK even asking permission to take a photo of a mother weeping, with a child dead in her arms due to cancer, to promote research into one of our primary threats as western people so what makes this acceptable to do during drought in somewhere like 'Africa'? Is it worth it if the money flows in? Or are charities not engaging enough with positive messages about change? Does the need to present more and more impactful images devalue the underlying messages?

Your donation to Dig Deep stops people dying, that is a fact but it is also a message that plays on guilt to a certain extent and reduces the complexity of the impact of the water crisis to a single negative message which is perpetuated continually. When you give to Dig Deep you unlock potential, remove the roadblocks of illness and missed opportunity for education/livelihood to allow the breaking of well-established poverty cycles. You can invest in this kind of change because the communities we work with have incredible energy and drive to carry this forward. They demonstrate this throughout the project process and by asking to work with us in the first place. Looking back on our impact report I can see this enthusiasm shines through over and over by the project reports. Our beneficiaries are active, engaged and not passive onlookers.

Photo taken at Ndanai, by community member Justus, of children learning to wash their clothes after the project opening. It is a good example of what we can learn from the images taken by community members as to the wider impact of accessible and clean water.

So how can Dig Deep put this undertaking to portray our work with sensitivity and communicate positively with our donors into practise? I’m not 100% there yet but the answer must lie within the promotion of direct interaction between our beneficiaries and our donors, to tell their story directly as opposed to their story told by us. One measure we have agreed to roll out is to provide cheap digital cameras to communities and to ask them to record the progress of their projects along with brief captions. Everyone changes when they are put on camera and no one likes being filmed unless it is on their own terms. By lending these cameras out, and with no specific direction, we hope to be able to have a unique insight into what our beneficiaries deem important about their communities, projects and their impact. We very much look forward to sharing these with you all unedited and unabridged.

International Women's Day 8th March 2014

Saturday marks International Women's Day. Dig Deep started with the support of women's activist Agnes Parayio, UN Person of the Year in 2005. Since then we have continued to work to empower women to overcome the challenges they face in Kenya.

In the majority of the communities we work with it is traditionally the role of women and girls to collect water and fuel. Through reducing the labour women face in doing this, our projects enable them to have a more equal role within their communities and also receive an education.

Here is one of many of our projects this year that assisted women directly:

Supporting mothers in building a school for their children – The Alton Masai Project

At Dig Deep we know how important it is that our projects are led by those that benefit from them – the local community. We also know that for a project to be successful, women must have at least an equal role to men in making it happen.

The Alton Maasai project is a community based organisation which was started by a group of women living the remote Maasai community of Oldanyati. They had a simple aim - to provide their children with the education that they never had. The local school was too far away for their youngest children to walk to so there was only one solution – they had to build their own pre-school.

After years of hard work they were able to see their dream realised with the construction of their first classroom. This incredible achievement took years of fundraising and months of back breaking work during the construction process, with the women carrying water over 7km to the construction site from the nearest river. Within the first month of opening the school had enrolled 150 students – however, there were no funds left to build toilets for the school. This was a serious health risk that threatened to undo everything that the women had worked so hard to accomplish.

Dig Deep was able to solve this problem through helping the Alton Maasai Project to construct latrines for the students and staff.  We are now working to improve the school’s water supply to ensure that the community have everything they need to provide their children with the education they had dreamed of. 

Dig Deep Impact Report 2012/13 - By Peter Fitzsimmons, Chairman of the Trustees

Peter Fitzsimmons is Chairman of Dig Deep’s Board of Trustees. Peter co-founded the charity with Jo Zeevi in 2007 and both remain actively engaged on the Board having overseen the rapid increase in the impact of Dig Deep in alleviating water poverty in Kenya.

"When we first conceived of Dig Deep in 2007, Jo and I were still students. We were introduced to an inspirational woman Agnes Pareyio, UN Person of the Year in 2005, and set out to raise £25,000 for our first project providing sustainable water supplies to the community of Sakutiek. We did this in 2008 and the project continues to provide clean water to thousands of people.

From those early days, we have come on leaps and bounds. That we have seen our income grow from £64,000 to £319,000 with just a single member of staff in the UK, Ben Skelton, for all but the final two months of this period is a testament to his dedication and the marvellous support of our volunteers. Their generosity of time and expertise combined with the support of several partner organisations has allowed us to grow during this difficult period for charities. The engagement of over 200 UK students as Dig Deep ambassadors has proved an innovative approach to fundraising and to be a mutually rewarding activity for those involved.

An early draft taken to Kenya to show our beneficiaries

In Kenya the dedication of our fundraisers has manifested itself in an unprecedented impact on a whole host of different projects this year, some of which are described in the following pages. They have been conducted in the same spirit of partnership as our first with Agnes and have been expertly overseen by Anna Banyard, a talented engineer and former volunteer who has joined our team.

This year I had the privilege of accompanying the Trustees on a visit. The highlight was undoubtedly the community’s response at Kagasek where a thousand community members assembled for the opening ceremony of the rainwater harvesting projects at the local schools. Everything I saw in Kenya affirms the direction Dig Deep is taking and the high esteem in which our community led model is held by the beneficiaries we work with.

When we look back on 2012/13 I have no doubt we will see it as Dig Deep’s take-off year. The progress organisationally and operationally has been exponential.

My sincere thanks goes out to all of our supporters and volunteers, whose gift of time enhances everything that we do."

Peter Fitzsimmons

VIEW IMPACT REPORT

Kenya 2014 - By James Haughton

Well I’m coming to the end of another trip to visit projects here in Kenya. It has been a useful trip. It is easy in the UK to lose track of how things work over here and the challenges that local people face. Life is very difficult for people here but there is genuine hope and heaps of potential.

What’s “Africa”? Its 1 billion people, 53 countries and maybe 3,000 languages. It’s impossible to simplify about one nation, made up of many tribes such as Kenya, and generalising about a continent is plain dangerous. Each community and tribe has its own dynamics and social systems. It was really hammered home this trip how important it is that our Field Officers originate from those contexts in which we work with the locally elected water committees. This is a direction in which we have been moving over the past few years.

While I’m on the topic of generalisations just type “African child” into google images and compare it to “European child”. It’s sad for me to see the results of the former search with every other image a child in tears or a victim of disaster or famine. I do not deny the suffering of many, but rather it is the representation of hopelessness that pervades our conceptions of “Africa” that irritates me.

One thing that humbled me this trip was meeting so many Head Teachers that provided free places (no free schooling in Kenya) to orphaned and destitute children. Such charity has a very detrimental effect on the economy of the school but nonetheless this is a society that does what it can to help its neighbour.
It’s surprising even to me know how a water project at a school can have unanticipated benefits. Increasingly access to clean water attracts new students, encourages children to board instead of walking kilometres a day and thus increases the budget of the schools to reinvest in staff. At Rotik school in Ndanai region I spoke to the deputy head about his water supply and was taken aback at his estimate of how much the school pays a week for the transport of water, £51, when the average salary of one of his staff a week was just £10.

What’s worse is that the donkey fetched water from a spring 2 miles away contains unsafe levels of bacteria and contaminants. But it’s deemed worth 5 teachers’ salaries a week because it is essential to the existence of the school and education in that district.

I am optimistic about the future of Kenya and of Africa as a continent. By cooperation with those who know what needs fixing in their communities we can open up opportunities, beyond the immediate health benefits of clean water, to remove barriers and aid the development of stronger schools and local economies.

First Kenya visit of 2014 - By Ben Skelton

I’m about to travel out to Kenya to spend three weeks working with Dig Deep’s locally based staff. Here’s what we’ll be getting up to.

As soon as I land in Nairobi we’ll be meeting with local supporters and partners to plan our next round of school education project. Why is a water charity getting involved in education you might well ask?

Well, we know that making sure kids are washing their hands with soap at critical times and using toilet facilities can be just as important for health as making sure they have access to a clean water supply. However, teaching kids to do this is no easy task, especially if your school has only just got access to clean water and toilets.

This is why we are providing training for teachers in rural Kenya in the very best ways of getting these messages across to their students – often through using the power of fun, interactive games to help kids figure out the solutions themselves.

After these meetings in Nairobi its off to the rural communities where our projects take place. We’ll be monitoring the progress of a whole host of different projects – from a large scale deep well which will soon be providing water to a whole community, to simple interventions in schools involving hygienically capturing rainwater and building simple toilet blocks.

In doing this we will be working in partnership with non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and community groups who live and work in the communities we serve. Working with these partners is vital to the success of our projects. Not only do their staff and volunteers speak the local language(s) and understand their communities, they also bring other specialist knowledge to the table.

Just to give you an example, one of these partnerships is with the Olare Orok Motorogi Trust (OOMT) who work on the periphery of the Masai Mara. The vision of OOMT is to ensure the long-term conservation of the Maasai Mara ecosystem through empowering periphery communities to gain significant and tangible benefits from conservation.

Over the last three years we have worked with OOMT to support and improve existing community water projects and install rainwater harvesting in schools. OOMT are able to advise us on the best locations for new water projects to reduce human wildlife conflict by ensuring that herdsmen no longer have to take their cattle to water sources that are in areas inhabited by endangered animals such as lions and elephants.

Right, I need to get packing - we’ll be sending out video updates over the next few weeks so stay tuned!