KASHWESHA Community Resource Centre: A Telecentre standing tall in empowering Slum Dwellers

KASHWESHA Community Resource Centre is a civil society organization committed to promoting the rights of the slum dwellers in a low cost residential area in Nairobi, Kenya. It begun in the year 2001 as a community based organization that focused on the well being of its members through capacity building, by ensuring that its members who mainly consisted of the slum dwellers got the available resources and support. The telecentre serves community members from the adjacent Korogocho slums, KCC slum village, Kariobangi and Dandora areas. The word KASWESHA stands for Kariobangi South Welfare and Slum housing Association.

KASHWESHA Community Resource Centre registered in 2006 under the co-operative act as a housing co-operative society. In August 2008 under the visionary coordinator Mr. James Njoroge KASWESHA introduced a resource centre which initially kicked of with two computers. He started by offering training in computer packages. Early this year Mr. Njoroge applied for the CISCO training program. This is an online based global program that teaches students computer networking and other information technology-related skills, preparing them for jobs as well as for higher education in engineering, computer science and related fields. Though the program requires a would be centre of training have at least 30 computers KASWESHA telecentre was exempted because of the centre’s impressive record of helping the surrounding community. Under the program two telecentre staff attended a training of trainers workshop and currently work as the CISCO trainers. In August this year 12 youths received certificates on successfully completing the first of these trainings.   

KASWESHA programs are broad based: they are inclusive of the many social-economic tribulations that slum dwellers face ranging from  Reproductive health for Widows and Young people, Counseling service for Girls at Risk and those that are affected and provision of Home based Care for the infected as well as teach women and youths on computers and business skills. KASWESHA’s prime objectives remain to advocate for lower costs on development driven projects (using local materials, local consultants, local labor etc), facilitate informal settlement and upgrading of the slums to foster Incremental and progressive housing and encourage slum-dwellers led settlement upgrading.

As with many other Telecentres in third world countries KASWESHA too faces challenges of sustainability as given the background of most students, training is done at very low rates with some students even studying for free. The Telecentre premises are rented at a cost of approximately 175 US dollars a month. However Mr. Njoroge is positive that these challenges will soon be a thing of the past as the job done at the telecentre has not gone unnoticed. The area councilor recently provided a piece of land for the construction of a Telecentre and with fundraiser set to be done soon, the Telecentre could move to its own land. More good news for the telecentre came on 5^th October 2009 during world habitat day when UN-HABITAT identified the Telecentre as a beneficiary of the UN Habitat opportunity fund.

The Telecentres is also a registered member of Kenya Network of telecentres (KENTEL) and Mr Njoroge notes that knowledge sharing is key to the survival of telecentres as knowledge shared with the right indent can do wonders for any person or organization. While knowledge sharing as a process has always been an integral part of Telecentre development, incorporation of contemporary ICT has added value to its effectiveness. He added that web-based content distribution technologies such as “Blogs” have created unprecedented advantages for telecentre practitioners to engage in knowledge creation. All these technologies now enable the capture of resources at all levels of intellect to make it available to a larger community that can take suitable advantage.