Experience(Janet's Influence

Janet is no ordinary consultant. Most, if not all her work is inspired by her lived experiences in both her personal and professional life over the last three decades. Janet thus brings not just professional inputs in her assignments, but often conviction from her experiences, about what she may be advocating for.
Some highlights:

• Janet grew up and has lived in both urban and rural Kenya, having been brought up by a mother who was a teacher and later became a Headmistress, and a father who was a teacher and later became an Assistant Education Officer. Due to work demands especially on her father’s side, their family moved from place to place, a factor which in retrospect, made her appreciate the challenges of poverty across many different communities. Her mother’s determination to hold the family together, grow and manage family assets, not thinking of herself as a woman who needs to sit back and be on the receiving end, as is often the case with many traditional cultures around her, made her embrace women’s empowerment at a personal level. Whenever Janet has an opportunity, she mentors young women against thinking of themselves as mere recipients of men’s ‘generosity’, but as full human beings equally made in God’s image (like men), with all capabilities to rise to any level and achieve their dreams.
•  Working with international NGOs, which Janet did for over a decade, Janet was exposed to a variety of programme interventions among communities, aimed at addressing different challenges that communities experience in different contexts. She began to appreciate the importance of ‘context’ when development practitioners attempt to figure out how to intervene at grassroot levels, in the name of helping the poor. This experience helped her over the years understand the importance of generating solutions to the challenges communities experience, as much as possible, with them, and in some cases be deliberate in creative ways to help them regain their voice (where communities have lost it), which has often happened due to the bad practices those of us in the aid sector have propagated.
• Janet also witnessed many cases where despite the good intentions of many development actors working with communities, sustaining community projects once the organization (e.g. an INGO) is no longer operating in a particular geography, was difficult. She also observed that community expectations for INGOs working at community level (on the ground) were more likely to be higher as they saw them as being ‘better’ resourced and able to do projects for them. Such expectations were much lower when a community member they knew was running a small local NGO. In this latter case, communities in the area of operation were more likely to be willing to contribute to the success of any projects they had proposed to undertake in response to their issues. A major insight for Janet as she observed some of these dynamics, is that perception is everything! What we think of ourselves as development practitioners is one thing, but what communities think of us is an equally important factor to consider, when deciding where and how we work.
• Exposure to a lot of work when supporting the growth of local NGOs across Kenya especially in early to mid-2000, brought many other reflections and questions which lingered with Janet as she began to grow in her career and was keen to explore development approaches that can bring about change at scale. She wondered for example,
• What can make local NGOs desire to grow their capacity, not because of donor pressure or as a ‘carrot’ to get more funding, but for the sake of wanting to make a difference among the communities where they work?
• How can I support local organizations in such a way that they genuinely desire to strengthen their internal capabilities, so that they are able to be effective in their programmes and be able to attract more funding for scaled up operations?’