"Jitegemee" - educating vulnerable youth in Kenya for sustainability

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

Jitegemee Children’s Program (“Jitegemee” in Kiswahili means “to sustain yourself”) is a community-based organization that provides formal and non-formal educational support to vulnerable youth and former street children in Machakos, Kenya, along with other integrated support services, such as healthcare, food and nutrition, and psychosocial support. The program was founded almost twenty years ago and has grown from an informal program providing school sponsorship to a handful of former street children, to a child-centered program that provides holistic, integrated services to 200+ youth annually, as well as to parents and schools in the Machakos community. In line with its name, the goal of Jitegemee is for marginalized young people to gain an education and as a result, become self-sustaining.

Jitegemee was founded in 2003 during the age of and is rooted in the discourse of the Millennium Development Goals – namely MDGs 1 and 2 (Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger; Achieve Universal Primary Education). The earliest support provided to youth on the streets of Machakos was food and basic literacy and numeracy training.

However, as the MDG discourse has shifted to that of Sustainable Development Goals, so has Jitegemee’s focus expanded to ensure that sustainability is the goal not just for the beneficiaries, but also permeates every aspect of the program. Over the past two years, the organization has transitioned from being mostly volunteer-run, to a more professionally staffed team, along with strengthened systems aimed at ensuring the organization itself is sustainable, as this ensures a greater level of dependence to the youth it serves.

Jitegemee has called on scholar-practitioners to engage with and inform this process and ensure the organization’s practices are increasingly aligned with national and global standards and best practices. While calling on outsiders, such as some of those included in this panel, the program continues to be locally run and draws on participatory action research to inform program development to ensure services are grounded in the local needs, context and reality.

The four presentations on this panel focus on different research and project work using Jitegemee Children’s Program as the research site. They include
- Mind the Gap: Moving from Dependency to Sustainability
- Aligning Rehabilitation Curriculum with National Standards to ensure Sustainability
- (Re)centering girls’ voices in peer-led SRH education
- Developmental Evaluation: meeting the challenges of donor versus beneficiary responsive monitoring and evaluation for dynamic and sustainable programming

This panel (including the Chair) includes two Jitegemee staff, two board members, and three scholar-practitioners. All have spent time in Machakos, Kenya, conducting participatory action research and developmental evaluation to analyze and develop different areas of the program.

Jennifer Katiwa and Verity Norman-Tichawangana are the two program directors and provide a leadership perspective on how the program takes a participatory approach to identifying programming gaps. They also discuss the challenges the program has faced while attempting to balance provision of services that ultimately increases vulnerable youth’s sustainability, rather than dependency. Specifically, they look at how the goal of sustainable employment or earning has not been a guaranteed outcome for graduates of the program, and how the organization is currently developing programming to ensure vulnerable youth are better equipped with the skills needed to navigate the formal or informal labour market.

Beverley Bell, a Fulbright Specialist who has consulted to and worked with Jitegemee over the past year, discusses how she led the redevelopment of JItegemee’s revised Rehabilitation Curriculum to ensure it was formalized and aligned to Ministry of Education standards. Bell took a collaborative and participatory approach to move the curriculum from an informal collection of topic areas to a more rigorous curriculum that is both responsive to local needs and challenges, and which also conforms to the thematic areas outlined by the Kenya Institute of Curriculum Development.

Doctoral candidate, Nyaradzai Changamire, used Jitegemee as the site for the phenomenological study on sexual and reproductive health (SRH) education that forms the basis of her doctoral research. Changamire’s research focuses on the peer education SRH program at Jitegemee, a program that emerged from the need to address increased teen pregnancies, early marriages and related challenges faced by girls in the program. The study focuses on program design, opportunities and challenges within this program, in particular, the complexities and opportunities of implementing a SRH education program in a non-formal education setting.

Lastly, researcher David Bell and board member (and researcher) Martina Amoth, engage with Jitegemee Children’s Program as a site through which to practice the principles of Patton’s Development Evaluation methodology.

Through offering this multi-faceted perspective of Jitegemee Children’s Program, this panel will share the real contextual challenges and opportunities of developing and implementing a comprehensive “whole person” education approach in a low-income, complex and ever-changing setting. While the presenters will share some information related to the impact of different components of Jitegemee’s program, the panel recognizes that the needs of the youth they serve continue to evolve, and so does the program. Therefore, the presenters invites peers who may be interested in learning from the panel experience. Most importantly, the panel primarily seeks collegial and critical engagement from peers who have some understanding and knowledge of programs of this nature to share ideas and insights for potential adoption/ adaptation by Jitegemee.

Pertinent broader questions that will be explored in the presentations as well as through meaningful dialogue with peer attendees will include:
1. What are effective ways of bringing external support to enhance quality and effectiveness of local programs such as Jitegemee’s while respecting and maintaining local ownership?
2. How can different aspects of a “whole person” education approach (health, vocational/business skills, mentorship and peer support) be harmonized in the curriculum?
3. What continuous and adaptive steps can Jitegemee take in program implementation and evaluation in order to remain relevant and responsive to local and national needs and trends, and to ensure sustainability?

Sub Unit

• SIG: Africa

Chair

• Jacqueline Mosselson, University of Massachusetts Amherst

Individual Presentations

• Mind the Gap: Moving from Dependency to Sustainability - Verity Norman-Tichawangana, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

• - Aligning Rehabilitation Curriculum with National Standards to ensure Sustainability - Beverley Bell, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

• The School and My Health- (Re)Centering Young Women’s Voices in Peer-Led Sexual and Reproductive Health (SRH) Education. - Nyaradzai Changamire, University of Massachusetts Amherst

• Development Evaluation in action: meeting the challenges of donor versus beneficiary responsive monitoring and evaluation for dynamic and sustainable programming - David Bell, Clark University; Martina Amoth, Jitegemee Children's Program

Discussant

• Jacqueline Mosselson, University of Massachusetts Amherst