"I know that I know nothing" - my key insights from spending a month in Kenya
What I learned from being in Kenya around participants from 23+ countries for 4 weeks
This summer, I was planning to spend my time getting deeper into the math behind AI and possibly interning at an AI company to expand my skills + knowledge in the space. But, when I got accepted into Global Encounter (GE)’s program in Kenya, I spent time thinking about the tradeoffs between this opportunity and AI work. What I realized, especially talking to people familiar with GE, was that it was an incomparable experience and, as I grow in AI, the loss of missing out on a better internship would be worse.
So, I took a 21 hour flight journey to Kenya, and through this post, I want to cover some of the key learning I had in Kenya - feel free to skip to certain sections you find interesting:
The Actualization of Neglected Problems
How Low Levels of Diversity Leads to More Stigma in Society
Service Site Project
Technological Trends
The Actualization of Neglected Problems
This insight is quite obvious: there are problems around the world that has made lives miserable, with bombings, terrorist attacks, extreme corruption within governments, and so much more. However, the depth to which I understood this insight touched my heart. I can’t express the emotions I felt hearing other’s stories through a Substack post, but I had so many “holy, this is a real issue” moments. There were some people from Afghanistan talking about how they don’t go to school or have to hide from the Taliban, some people from Iran talking about having to wear a hijab or they would be imprisoned, some people from Tajikistan who have to pray in secret, some people in Syria who have to ensure they don’t talk about politics anywhere since Whatsapp and other means of communication are monitored + there was a long revolution of ISIS killing non-sunnis, which Syrians are still recovering from. And I’ve heard about most of these on the news, but the emotion coming from people telling me these about these conditions in their countries just made it so real.
The second night of GE, my roomate and I were talking about how her house got bombed two times in Syria and she almost died - people in these conflict-filled areas are confronting so much on a day-to-day basis that these things are so normal and I can’t even imagine what their situations are like.
What hearing these stories + looking at the people under the poverty line in Kenya made me realize is that our lives are based on one factor: luck. The only reason I’m here is luck based on me being born into my family. If i was born into another family, maybe I would’ve been homeless or in the middle of a war. The point of this is to not continuously feel bad for the other people because this luck factor is out of my control. Instead, the point is to internalize this, be grateful, and use it as motivation to do more good in the world.
How Low Levels of Diversity Leads to More Stigma in Society
A couple of months ago, I listened to a podcast episode on “The Knowledge Project” with Kunal Shah, where he mentioned that “societies with low diversity of ethnicity tend to have higher levels of trust”. My time in Kenya made this concept clear + it brought me to more insights about it.
Something I personally wanted to explore in Kenya was “What are the top causes of stigma in Kenyan society and how does it compare to other parts of the world” - having people from 23 countries in the program made the data collection process easier and I found a lot of interesting causes, especially in Kenya including:
Disabled children - these children are a source of fear and shame since they’re perceived as a curse. As a result, parents sometimes abandon these children, lock them inside the house for multiple years to hide them from society, or sometimes kill them.
Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) - many tribes in Kenya believe that men should marry women who are circumcised. Women and girls are pressured to get this circumcision (through FGM), otherwise they wont get a husband and would be stigmatized within their community. According to UNICEF state of affairs for 2013, 9.3 million women and girls, or 27 per cent of all women and girls in Kenya have undergone genital mutilation. Kenya illegalised the practice in 2011, but FGM is still performed in secret camps or undergrounds with unclean razors + in the case that something goes wrong and there’s excessive bleeding, women and girls can’t even go to hospitals because they would get arrested for being part of this illegal practice in the first place.
LGBTQ+ - being part of the community is known to be “a foreign practice from the West that’s not aligned with African cultures and as such, severe punishment should be meted out on offenders.” In Kenya, being part of LGBTQ+ is illegalised and this crime often leads to imprisonment.
Comparing this to other countries, I found that there was a general split between countries where many of these causes of stigma are very accepted, like in Canada and France, and the rest haven’t really accepted it. Understanding why this is the case, I went back to the point that Kunal Shah made: when there are low levels of diversity (race, religion, culture, etc), the people in the community are treated like one family, making the trust high. the connectedness is so prevalent that when you are an exception to the “normal” (whether it is intentional or not), it’s very looked down upon. When you are in society with a high level of diversity, there are already so many differences that having one more takes less friction to adjust to because there isn’t as much trust/connectedness, per se. I see this more as a 0-1 and 1-100 process. If a country has low levels of diversity, increasing diversity through reducing stigma (from 0-1) will be harder than if a country is already diverse and just needs to get more and more diverse (1-100).
An example of this is the perception of ‘mental health’ around the world. In places like Pakistan and Kenya, people who have a mental health condition are known as curses or crazy for thinking something is wrong with them; this leads to them being shamed and reluctant to go seek medical care due to the fear of being judged. I would correlate this to the levels of diversity in Kenya being low. On the other hand, in Canada (a place with high levels of diversity), mental health issues are relatively accepted, with mental health clinics and accessible support for all ages.
Stigma is quite parallel to immigration in this sense. If an Indian goes into a Scandinavian country, where they there are low levels of diversity in terms of race (because of viking ancestry), being so different will make them stigmatized. Whereas, if an Indian goes to a multicultural country, it isn’t as hard to fit in because everyone is already so different.
With Kenya specifically, I was trying to understand if there’s a neglected problem I could work on (especially since I was going to be spending a lot of time there + there’s a lot of value in talking to people on-ground). To me, it seemed like reducing one cause of stigma could be a very transferrable approach to other causes. So, I pondered: what needs to be true to significantly reduce this stigma?
I realized that shifting society’s mindset on these topics is a hard and tedious process. For instance, in 1848, a small group of visionaries started a movement to secure equal rights for women in the United States, but it took more than 70 years just to win the right for women to vote. The main action we can do collectively is raise awareness through workshops, social media, protests, changing school curriculums to be more inclusive, etc (this process can be further expedited with countries who have high technology penetration). International influence can also possibly expedite the process if other countries are adapting to reduce certain causes of stigma.
Based on the research I’ve done on a lot of causes of stigma, I do have a lot of questions I’m hoping to explore further, such as:
Does naming something make the problem worse (specifically with mental health)?
Does prohibition (making practices/behaviour illegal) make problems worse? This is somewhat true for the female genital mutilation process in Kenya, as explained before.
Service Site Project
The Global Encounters program in Kenya partnered with a variety of schools in Mombasa, from private and public to some with children who had disabilities. I was working with the Mbaraki school for girls along with some of the other participants at the camp. It was such an enlightening experience to work with the school and get to know the children at a personal level. Through knowing them better, our plan was to come up with a long-term and sustainable solution that could benefit them in the school setting.
One thing the teachers pointed out is that there were many students struggling with English and even after their grade curriculum, it was hard to grasp for many and they were repeating grades. Another thing we learned from both the teachers and children was that they loved art, whether it be dancing, singing, or drawing. Our group implemented a reusable flashcard system that would help with their literacy skills.
The way it works is half of the students in the class write out words on the straight line of the flashcard (see below); this would be based on the instructions a teacher gives (e.x. write down a word that starts with the letter “b”). Subsequently, the other half of students each get one flashcard and read the word, understand it, and draw it out. The teachers can easily check them as they go around the classroom and help them correct any errors with writing, spelling, and understanding of the word.
The flashcards were made of pieces of paper that we cut out, drew a line on, and then laminated, making them reusable. We also provided the school with whiteboard markers, which is considered aid because once they run out, they won’t have more. However, in the time that the markers last, the system will hopefully help them understand the value of having an interactive curriculum, motivating some of the school funds going towards whiteboard markers to keep this system running.
Many solutions in developing countries are cheap and impactful, but people in the community don’t see the value in the purchase in the first place, and if they do, many times they don’t see the value in spending money on something that doesn’t bring immediate impact. An example of this is The Work and Iron Status Evaluation (WISE) study in Indonesia, which provided random men with iron supplements for several months. This proved to increase their income many times the cost of yearly supply of iron-fortified fish sauce (“a year’s supply of fish sauce cost $7 USD PPP, and for a self-employed male, the yearly gain in earnings was $46 USD PPP- an excellent investment”). Same thing with deworming pills in Kenya: when parents were asked to pay a few cents for these pills, almost all of them refused. Though in the long-term there were immense benefits since many of the children wouldn’t need to skip school due of sickness and that benefit would compound to effect their earning later on. These cases inspired the flashcard system to be implemented with aid helping the development process.
While making the flashcard system, talking to stakeholders about implementation, and reiterating the idea based on feedback, our group also wanted to do something short-term just to spend time with the children there and teach them a bit about our culture. We taught them to make skirts with pieces of fabric, painted them, and showed them our cultural dances, which they learned and showed to many parents and teachers on our last day visiting the school.
One of the most heartwarming memories I had at the school is when one of the children came up to me + some of the other participants and offered us her snack. For context, these children have to bring money from home to get food from the canteen and most of them go the entire school day without eating. They have nothing, yet they’re willing to give everything. It’s heartbreaking, at the same time, to see how their opportunities in life are limited. Many of them were telling me that their dream to is visit Canada one day and I just felt an immense amount of privilege being in the position I am right now.
I became emotionally attached with these children throughout the days I spent with them, as I drew Mickey mouses on their hands and showed them how to solve the Rubix cube, as they braided my hair, as we played soccer together. And now, many of the girls from the school still Facetime me to ask how I’m doing and I’m so grateful for the exposure I got at Mbaraki.
Technological Trends
In Nairobi, I was able to get more exposure into some of the emerging research and tech penetration happening in different sectors, such as:
Visiting a smallholder farm where SunCulture provided a farmer with solar pumps to irrigate his crops - a couple of months ago, I read a case study about SunPower and it was interesting to compare the parallels and differences between both. For instance, SunCulture’s biggest issue is getting people to understand the value of the solar pumps based on output, so they use their current users to do word-of-mouth marketing for every new client that is using the solar pumps, the current users get a discount on the monthly instalments they pay to the startup.
Touring Dr. Mansur Saleh’s cancer research lab in the Aga Khan University Hospital in Nairobi. I learned about their recent transition to digital records, as well as their novel method to use low dose radiation therapy (LDRT) to remove inflammation in the lungs of severe COVID patients.
Listening to members at the Brain and Mind Institute (BMI) in Nairobi about their research into mental health, neurodegenerative diseases, and their usage of deep learning.
Meeting Jay from Jacaranda Health, which uses NLP to help mothers get access to answers about their health or child immediately + expedite diagnosis processes to get medical help
My time in Kenya was definitely an unforgettable one - though there was a lot of learning and exposure, I had so many fun adventures. There were nights I stayed up till 2am talking to people about random things, dancing and doing karaoke, and playing foosball. I went jumping into the water off cliffs, rock climbing high up in the mountains, and overall just embodied the thinking of YOLO (“You Only Live Once”, not the AI algorithm), which I’ve seen portrayed after the program as well.
Forever grateful for the experience, the awesome people I met, as well as the personal growth I went through ❤️
p.s. if you have any thoughts/feedback on what I wrote or wanna jam out, feel free to reach out on Twitter, LinkedIn, or email me charania.shiza@gmail.com