Together we can create a world without extreme poverty, one happy village at a time

So, what is my vision of success? Of course it will vary from place to place, depending on the community, but this is how it plays out in my imagination. Let me take you for a stroll through a Happy Village.

As we walk, the first things we notice are the fruit trees. They are blossoming on roadsides, in school playgrounds and other public spaces. We stop to pick a piece of fruit – there’s plenty for everyone – and we say hi to many other people who are doing the same, on their way to work.

There are a lot of vegetable gardens now, surrounded by trees especially selected to return nutrients to the soil. Agricultural production has significantly increased. The effect has flowed into the local market. The vegetables are so colourful! All the parents now have a variety of nutritious food, including traditional, indigenous, plants to feed their families.

The river water is clear enough to wash clothes and there are fewer floods than there used to be – thanks to some indigenous trees planted on the banks. Every person has access to drinking water from a rainwater tank. All community spaces, like schools and libraries, have a rainwater tank and a latrine.

Passing the clinic, the nurse tells us that the number of people contracting malaria, HIV/AIDS and typhoid has dropped dramatically since she started working there. The distribution of mosquito nets and condoms has had the biggest impact. With the addition of a well-stocked pharmacy and an emergency vehicle, this happy village now enjoys better health than any community for miles around.

Better health and more sources of safe drinking water have made it possible for girls to start attending school in massive numbers. The burden of carrying water every day and caring for sick family members has been lifted from their shoulders. They have space to dream of their own education, future careers and families, and to simply enjoy childhood.

The increased agricultural production, as well as improving nutrition and health throughout the village, has also allowed a number of small businesses to spring up. A couple of local entrepreneurs bought solar panels and started a business charging mobile phones. Their customers don’t mind paying more than they used to, because the service is now available within their own village. It saves them a two hour walk!

Believe it or not, this is quite a big dream for many villages in Kenya at the moment. But it’s not too much to ask, is it? I strongly believe that we have a responsibility to try. After all, Nelson Mandela was right when he said,

"Overcoming poverty is not a gesture of charity. It is an act of justice. It is the protection of a fundamental human right, the right to dignity and a decent life."

How we work

Our strategies are flexible within the following ten point framework;
1. We operate in one small geographical area at a time – usually a village;
2. We use a genuinely consultative process to find out what the community wants;
3. We operate across a number of different disciplines at the same time to address the interdependence of problems;
4. Our staff and volunteers are well qualified;
5. We measure our success against the United Nations Millenium Development Goals;
6. We continuously report back to the community, our supporters and partners on our activities, finances and how we are performing against the Millenium Development Goals;
7. We focus on building good quality partnerships with other organizations;
8. We work in locations that have been neglected by most other charities;
9. We never expect people that do not have enough to eat to volunteer their time;
10. We are persistent.

It is so much easier to create change when you focus your attention. That’s why we operate at village level. We really get to know the communities that we work with, and they really get to know us.

Consultation is not just a word to the Happy Villages crew. It is a commitment to the communities that we work in to completely respect their right to self determination. We take the time to meet with as many of the community members as possible, including women and people of all ages and abilities. We engage them in genuine and continuous dialogue to ensure our programs properly serve them. We do not enter a community with a set of off-the-shelf project blueprints to impose upon the people that live there.

Happy Villages acts like a magnet for assistance for the community by helping them to prepare for interactions with outsiders. One important aspect is to help them obtain a degree of consensus about what will most benefit them. Our role is to find an appropriate partner organisation to fulfill each need and to nurture the relationships between the partners, Happy Villages and the community. If no suitable partner exists, we do the job ourselves.

Our staff (all volunteers at this stage), work across a range of sectors, as follows:
- Sustainable agriculture;
- Environment;
- Water and sanitation;
- Health;
- Education;
- Energy, communications and transport;
- Gender.

While we believe strongly in volunteering, we realize that it has limits. If people are being forced by their circumstances to search for food for hours every day, of course we won’t expect them to volunteer. We do not use the amount of resources donated by the community to measure their commitment. That would further disadvantage extremely poor communities with nothing to give.

We believe that communities with nothing to give are most in need of our help. That’s why we use a genuine process of consultation, conducted by qualified, local (Kenyan), community development workers to obtain and assess commitment.

We also make proper use of local community knowledge when collecting baseline data for indicators across all of the United Nations Millenium Development Goals. I have listed the goals here:
1. Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger;
2. Achieve universal primary education;
3. Promote gender equality and empower women;
4. Reduce child mortality;
5. Improve maternal health;
6. Combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases;
7. Ensure environmental sustainability;
8. Develop a global partnership for development.

We regularly measure our progress against the Millenium Development Goals and report the results to the community, our partners, and of course, our supporters. Although we realize that we will sometimes fail, we will try again. We may try a different tactic, but we will persist until we succeed.

Extreme poverty hurts

Imagine the worst flu you’ve ever had. Your head’s pounding like a drum. The pain slices into your limbs so deeply that your bones seem to be shattered. Even if you were well you’d be withering in this heat. You can barely get up. Then add nausea and stomach cramps. It’s not just the flu. It’s an epidemic, and it’s sweeping across the continent like a tsunami, killing your neighbours and family members. It’s malaria.

There’s no pharmacy to get medication, no relief in sight. And now you have to walk forty minutes to collect water.

Every step ricochets painfully in your head. Every! Time! Your! Foot! Touches! The! Ground!

It would be so easy to give in to hopelessness, but you don’t. You just get on with it. You know in your heart that if you persist you’ll get back home with water to drink. You will get through the day.

That story may sound extreme. It is extreme, but unfortunately it’s not an exaggeration. Malaria is a daily fact of life for far too many people in Africa right now, and it is only one aspect of their suffering. Here is the true story of extreme poverty in Kenya (United Nations Statistics Division):
- Over 8.6 million people (23% of the population) struggle to get by on less than $1 per day;
- 24% of primary school aged children are not enrolled in school;
- A baby born today is likely to live just 51 years;
- Of every 100 children born, 12 die before their fifth birthday;
- 43% of people (about 16.1 million) do not have access to improved drinking water.

We created Happy Villages to assist people out of this misery, out of extreme poverty. The scale and complexity of the problems makes them seem insurmountable at first glance, but they’re not. Jeffrey Sachs, International Development Expert, argues,

“The basic truth is that for less than a percent of the income of the rich world nobody has to die of poverty on the planet. That's really a powerful truth.”

In one way it’s very simple. On the other hand though, the causes of poverty are extremely complex. Community development projects frequently fail. Natural, political and social processes are inextricably linked everywhere in the world, and nowhere more so than in Africa. We have designed our way of working with that knowledge in mind.