118 – Festive Special: Another Perspective on Giving

[00:00:00] David: Hi and welcome to the IDEMS podcast. I’m David Stern, one of the founding directors of IDEMS, and I’m here today again with my colleague James Kaleli Musyoka. We’re going to discuss a sort of more festive episode because it’s the festive season, and there is a previous episode where Lily and I were discussing charitable giving in different ways, and I thought it’d be really nice to follow up with you, James, because coming through the Kenyan education system, as you have, you’ve got a lot of experience of just seeing the challenges that are there, fees, school fees, what that means, students dropping out at different levels. But it’s not something where money is always the limiting factor and this is where it’s always complicated. 

[00:01:01] James: Yes, it is. Yeah, this is a very interesting subject that I hadn’t given a lot of thought of before this podcast. So let’s see how it goes. Yeah, so looking forward to these interactions today. Yeah. 

[00:01:13] David: So let’s just discuss your personal experience a little bit because you were at a time when very fortunately there was a university scholarship for the top students of your year to carry on in their postgraduate studies as part of a recruitment program into the future lecturers. This was the graduate assistant program. 

[00:01:42] James: Yes, the graduate assistant program. Yeah, so the program was designed to bring back the best students and have them become part of the staff, teaching staff at the university. Yeah, so for me that was 2008. 

[00:01:57] David: And you were the top statistics student of your year, and along with four of your colleagues who were the sort of top maths students, when I arrived in Kenya, you guys were just starting your masters, and I had the privilege to interact with all of you. 

[00:02:15] James: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I think our timing coincided. When I was arriving to take up the scholarship, you were also arriving for your time in Maseno. 

[00:02:23] David: In a previous episode, we’ve mentioned you being sent home and brought back, but that’s a separate story, which we won’t go into on this occasion. 

[00:02:31] James: Yeah, exactly.

[00:02:32] David: But I think this scholarship was really impactful for you and it was really valuable for your colleagues as well who have all created careers in different ways through that opportunity. And how often has it been offered since within the university?

[00:02:51] James: I think it’s only been offered once since then. No, I think probably twice, but not in the same way. In the two subsequent times, it’s not been as big as it was during my year. I think during my year, it was quite big in the sense that quite a number of people came in. There were many positions, I think, declared during my year. But then after that, I think probably in the year that followed, probably two people came in. 

[00:03:18] David: But if you remember, I want to jog your memory on this. Maybe you weren’t aware of this because they were not university funded. We found additional external funding to make that happen. 

[00:03:29] James: Yes, there was something that stimulated them to join into that program. Yeah. But I remember, I think, Mike coming through that. 

[00:03:38] David: So Mike was part of your group, he was just a few months later, but he was part of your same cohort. 

[00:03:44] James: Yes, exactly. Actually, it has never happened since then. 

[00:03:47] David: Fundamentally, this is the thing, that it’s 15 years since that big injection within the university, which was so successful, there have been no such opportunities except things that were externally funded. 

[00:04:01] James: Yes, exactly. 

[00:04:02] David: This is a really interesting sort of observation that there are known ways to help students transition into further studies. You were the top stats student of your year, and given that opportunity and you’ve built a career in the university, you’re a lecturer, you’ve had a lot of success in a number of different ways, thanks to that opportunity, which has never been repeated. 

So when we talk about what giving can do there’s a lot of cases where giving creates these sorts of opportunities, which within the systems, the finances aren’t there to be able to fill in. And there’s less so at the postgraduate level, but at school level, this is happening all the time. There’s huge programs which are creating scholarships for kids to stay in school who would otherwise be out of school. And it’s life changing. 

[00:05:01] James: Yeah, Yeah. In Kenya, in the schools, actually, it’s the government that does that.

[00:05:05] David: Not just the government. The number of students who are on private scholarships based on external funding from NGOs is huge. 

[00:05:14] James: Yeah, exactly. There are quite a number there who have been sponsored by NGOs. Yeah. 

[00:05:18] David: I know small organisations who have seen hundreds of students through Kenyan schools in that way, where they would literally, those kids would have dropped out of school otherwise. And they’re the small programs. These are small initiatives. There are big initiatives as well. There are government initiatives, but they don’t reach everyone. And a lot of that gap is filled in with this sort of NGO charitable sector. 

[00:05:44] James: Yeah, private sector coming in. Yeah. Yeah. A big example is actually the Equity bank, for example, in Kenya, that does a big part of that actually very publicly.

[00:05:53] David: Yes, exactly. The Equity bank does that. Even Mpesa Foundation does bits here and there and those are some of the big actors. Red Rubber Board is a small one that we know and that we’ve interacted with, they do it with just a few hundred students from a particular area where they’ve built those personal relationships. And it’s transformative and it’s needed. 

This is one of those instances where in the Kenyan society, this is one of the reasons Kenya is such an educated society now. Access to education is really substantial partly because of so many of these initiatives.

[00:06:29] James: Exactly. Yeah. These initiatives actually, yeah, they give an opportunity to people who are less privileged, who would not otherwise, have had the opportunity to get good education. I think these programs, as you mentioned, they have really extended the scope, they have improved the number of people who are going through the education system in Kenya.

[00:06:47] David: Absolutely. But, it’s always complicated. This explosion of people going through the education system has led to a word called tarmacking. And I think our audience might not know what tarmacking means, so please explain it to them. 

[00:07:03] James: Tarmacking, I think it’s when you finish school and you are ready for the job market, but then it’s taking time for you to get a job. There is a delay in you getting an opportunity, a job opportunity. So, tarmaking is the aspect of moving from one organisation to the other, looking for employment. There’s a lot of people who have come out of the Kenyan education system who are yet to get opportunities, employment opportunities or job opportunities.

And actually, I think, yeah, partly because, I think, these initiatives that you’re mentioning, so there are more people coming out of the education system than the economy can absorb, I think. That’s the problem. 

[00:07:42] David: Well, in general, it’s about silver bullet solutions in some sense. If you take the problem as helping people access education then you can solve that problem, but you will create another problem because you’ve now created an unbalance because you’ve suddenly got many more people coming out with skills than can be absorbed, because there hasn’t been the equivalent effort at the place where they would otherwise be absorbed or gain experience.

One of the things which I think is really important there is that actually the inequalities tend to persist because most of the people tarmacking tend to be the people who needed help to get through in the first place because they don’t have the connections to get the jobs. And so there’s definitely this element which has been seen in the Kenyan context where some of those inequalities have persisted.

That people who now have an education, through support from outside or wherever, they’ve got their education. Without the right opportunities later, they now find themselves tarmacking because they don’t have the connections to get their foot in the door to the job market. 

[00:09:00] James: Yeah, I would think it’s a bit more complicated than that, but yeah, for most people that would be the case that they got support to go through education. And then at the end of it when they come out, they do not have the right people to connect them to these opportunities. And so they end up not getting jobs. So they keep hopping from one organisation to the other.

There are exceptions. I would say that is the case for most people, but there’s the flip side where there are interventions on the education side, but then there are no interventions on the job market side.

[00:09:34] David: Let’s go further on the job market, because this is fun. This is where the complexity really starts to come. 

[00:09:40] James: Okay. 

[00:09:40] David: Entry level positions, if you take Nairobi, and you’ve got NGOs in Nairobi employing graduates, their entry level positions are pretty good by Kenyan standards, quite often. Because we’ve had this when we’ve tried to offer internships and different things, that people then compare them to the entry level positions they could be getting in this highly competitive environment where you often need connections to get in.

But, you know, they offer sometimes 10 times as much as what a local going rate would be in a local school or something like this. 

[00:10:17] James: That’s true. For the NGOs, the entry level positions are actually paying very well but there are not many. 

[00:10:23] David: Ah, good, good. This brings us to this amazing contradiction, because actually the NGOs have often got in trouble because of the difference between their international salaries and their local salaries, which have pushed up the local salaries to be fairer. And by pushing them up, they’re now imbalancing the local job market, where they’re creating these few golden opportunities, and a mass of unsatisfied people who can’t access them because the local job market, if you go into a school and you get a board of governor job, that isn’t well paid.

[00:10:59] James: Even government jobs, comparing them to the NGO jobs, yeah, they’re really, there’s a very huge discrepancy there. You mentioned that the NGOs would be employing local people and still paying them local salaries, that’s the other thing. But those local salaries are still way higher than the local salaries in the other sectors, especially in the government.

[00:11:19] David: Now, but part of the reason for that is because of criticism in the past, where NGOs had these two tier systems for international salaries and local salaries, which was so different. And so they’ve been pushed to have better local salaries, creating an imbalance in the local job market. 

I am not saying what’s right and wrong here. I’m just trying to say that simple solutions almost always have unintended knock on consequences. I’m not saying the NGO shouldn’t be paying good salaries. But I am saying that if you’re employing people where there’s a lot of graduates, maybe it would be better to employ more people at a slightly lower rate, at least to get them the experience.

So if you’re going to employ people straight out of university, maybe there should be more of these entry level positions, and then you can give people the experience, because quite often the problem, the tarmacking problem, is getting your first job. 

[00:12:20] James: Yes, exactly. I wanted to say that you brought up a very important point there that it’s the lack of experience that causes people not to get these opportunities. I think because of the job market being flooded by so many people looking for jobs, these organisations are often looking for people who have some sort of experience. And so if you do not get that opportunity after college to gain some experience, then yeah, you are disadvantaged when you’re going for an interview. 

But we should also mention that actually the other thing that has been happening, that has been helping college graduates get experience has been the internships at the university level. But still, I don’t think they help that much with the job market. But there are people who use that as a way of getting the experience they need to get the jobs that they need.

[00:13:06] David: And I should just be clear on this but one of the reasons I went to Maseno University in Kenya was because of the attachment program, which Eli Bodo, who unfortunately passed away many years ago now was driving forward. And that’s what you’re talking about when you’re talking about these embedded internships, these attachment programs.

[00:13:27] James: They are part of the degree programs. Yeah. 

[00:13:29] David: Exactly. And this is something again where the opportunities on this are very diverse and some people can get good attachments and some people get less good attachments. 

[00:13:40] James: Actually there is a big problem now because with the success that we had in Maseno with this component of the training program, then all the other programs in Maseno and now in all the other universities have this attachment component. And so therefore the market is already flooded again. So people getting the right places to do their internships is also a challenge. And I think that compounds the problem then, yeah, because people go into very interesting organisations just to tick that box and they end up not coming out with the relevant experience for the kind of jobs that they are going to be looking for.

[00:14:16] David: Let’s put a bit of context on that as well because there also isn’t much investment in the undergraduate programs themselves. So part of the problem is that they’re going in without the necessary skills. So all of these things are complicated and it’s all so difficult to get all the different components. 

[00:14:33] James: Exactly. It’s not a very simple problem.

[00:14:36] David: No, it’s complex. And this is where we come back to this idea that if there is a successful international support for something, part of the problem is that the need is great, but it’s not a single thing. It’s never a single thing. It’s always this complex mix of different things which are needed. 

And that, I come back to the previous episode where with Lily we were discussing that if you’re in the charitable mood for giving and you can give locally and you can also think about giving globally, it’s not that it’s just about flooding the global market with giving. This is not what’s needed. It’s not a problem of money. 

If you actually got lots of money, well, actually a lot of the charities would just pile more and more into the same things. Whereas what you need is this diverse systems thinking, these different approaches. And so it is about balance. It’s about understanding how different things complement one another, how there’s a need to support all the academic levels.

There’s great interest right now in Kenya and more broadly across Africa in early childhood education. 

[00:15:43] James: Yeah. 

[00:15:44] David: And this has become a hot topic. 

[00:15:46] James: Yeah, exactly. And going back to your point that, you know, it’s not an issue about the money, but really thinking strategically how to give. I think something that has happened in Kenya recently that is related to that is with the HIV funding. So this is very different, but I think in the early years, the way the funding was done, there was a lot of duplication and a lot of organisations coming in just to dump the money. 

But what has happened now, I think, is what you’re saying. Things have changed a little bit and these charities and organisations are now thinking strategically. And there isn’t blanket funding now. There is really strategic funding, even within the regions where this is a problem. Now I think in Kenya, you cannot find one or two organisations, more than one organisation given funding for the same sort of, I think in terms of HIV funding, I think the interventions are at different levels.

I think what you’re trying to say in terms of how the charities are now beginning to work in Kenya, in this area of HIV, I think I’ve seen a change. Probably it will get to the education. I don’t know, but yeah. 

[00:16:48] David: But I think what’s really interesting, and this is something where in the UK, there is this big problem of competition between charities for funding sources and for different types of funding. That’s something which has gone into much of the sort of global giving in general, because this isn’t just the UK. Where charitable giving is happening, it often happens in such a way that it creates this competition, whereas what’s needed on the ground is collaboration.

This is actually really very interesting that you’re saying there are certain areas, and there are certain domains, where the needs have been such on the ground, that they have led to that collaboration winning out over competition, in a sense. But the complexities of this are huge, and it really is, when you come to a sort of international case where there is this competition, everybody’s asking you to give for their cause, which is the cause which they feel strongly about, and which you might share that feeling.

[00:17:50] James: Yeah. 

[00:17:51] David: But it’s, not necessarily balanced. I have stories about the sort of charities where lots and lots of money was given to help donkeys in environments where the donkeys were actually living well compared to those who funded them. And so, you know, I’m not saying that donkeys aren’t deserving of funds, but I am saying that I have seen disproportionate amount of funds to be allocated to components of society, which are not the fundamental issue.

A very simple component on that is that one of the best ways that I’ve heard to reduce violence against donkeys is to actually reduce violence against children. Because actually, who looks after the donkey, the children. If a child gets hit, they can take it out on the donkey, this is their outlet for the violence. So if you could reduce violence against children in that context, you would be reducing violence against donkeys. 

It’s these sorts of complex systems where sometimes the success of certain fundraising outweighs its value within a local context.

[00:19:02] James: Yeah. Yeah. Interesting.

You mentioned collaboration and I was thinking that this is a very important point there, competition versus collaboration. And I think it’s not just at the donors level, but also here down at the organisations receiving the funding. I think, yeah, in certain domains, I think that is already happening in Kenya that there is now more collaboration instead of competition. And I think probably it’s leading to better use of funding. 

[00:19:30] David: But there’s other cases where the competition is there and that needs to be recognised. It’s very interesting some of that competition and the funding cycles that they have in Kenya, the life expectancy for certain NGOs in Kenya, and community based organisations, is pretty low.

It’s interesting in the agroecology work we’ve been doing, there was this observation around this based on some of the studies the group we were working with did where the biggest determinant about the longevity of a CBO, community based organisation or non-governmental organisation, community based organisation was whether or not they owned their offices.

[00:20:10] James: Whether or not they owned their offices. 

[00:20:12] David: Yes. 

[00:20:14] James: Aha, because when the funding cycle ends and they do not own those offices, then they close down. 

[00:20:18] David: Then they can’t afford the rent and so on. Whereas when they own the offices, then, even if things aren’t going well, they can survive the bad periods long enough to be able to rebuild when the good times come again in terms of the opportunities. And the fact that there are these sorts of very much ups and downs with funding for organisations, there’s no core funding around really. And that’s really what these small organisations need.

And yet they get flooded with project money and then they have nothing, and they need to somehow flatten that curve. And it’s really hard. 

[00:20:53] James: It is. It is. Yeah. 

[00:20:54] David: And that’s where apparently in the agroecology organisations, the biggest determinant was if they owned their offices. That was essentially flattening the curve a bit. When things went well, some of the money went into building up the office sort of space and all of this, to improve their infrastructure and long term financing. And when things weren’t going well they just survived on what they’ve got. But by owning the office space, that made all the difference.

And it’s really interesting to see this. What I’m not saying is that suddenly we should put all the money into sort of infrastructure for all local organisations, because that’s not the answer either. 

[00:21:35] James: Yeah, exactly. 

[00:21:36] David: It is about this collaborative approach, multifaceted, thinking differently.

[00:21:42] James: Yeah. 

[00:21:43] David: So to come back to where we started, if we think about the opportunities that you started with at the postgraduate level, I long for the day when there is a real suite of opportunities from early childhood education right the way through education to PhD, which are coherent as a whole, rather than individually thought of, like your HIV work, if you said, which is getting more collaborative. I long for the day where actually there was a coherent suite of interventions from early childhood through to sort of real high levels of education supporting sensible decisions all the way along.

[00:22:29] James: Yeah, it is possible in Kenya, but I think, yeah, it is possible, but it’s challenging, given the way the education sector is so disenfranchised. But it’s something to look forward to. 

[00:22:40] David: And it’s something to work towards. 

[00:22:42] James: Work towards, yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly. 

[00:22:45] David: This has been great. Any last thoughts you’d like to share? 

[00:22:49] James: No, it’s been a very interesting topic, yeah. 

[00:22:52] David: It’s in the spirit of the festive season, it’s about giving, it’s about thinking about how we can contribute to others, but also how complicated it is. 

[00:23:04] James: Yeah, thanks, David. 

[00:23:06] David: Thank you