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.