Your Approach To Community Challenges Wrong, Chania Tells Leaders, Government.
Kiambu TNA coordinator Gladys Chania Mwangi is calling for a
radical departure from the old way government agencies have been managing community
challenges but instead build a co-creation system where the communities are provided
with the means to connect with one another to constantly invent new ways to
create value for their lives and themselves. She said that challenges such as drug
& substance abuse teenage pregnancy, child abuse and neglect, crime,
domestic violence, joblessness and poverty reduction were so local that only
the affected people could develop the best remedies to the same.
Speaking in Kiandutu Slums on Sunday where she attended
church, Madam Chania said that, as the people who bore the biggest blunt of
their own challenges, the local community were more likely to devise intelligent
solutions to the problems facing them than any governmental body chosen by
other methods.
“Most solutions that our leaders and the authorities come up
with as solutions to local problem often appease the most vocal groups who are
loud to be heard, leaving those most venerable ones to suffer in silence and at
times withdrawn to depression. Leaders adopt many measures that leave the
community's challenges unresolved and likely to fester and erupt at a future
date,” she said.
She therefore recommended for a community-based approach
where the leaders organised a body of local representatives in which each spoke
for a group of community residents who shared their outlook on the issues in
question. She lamented that the government’s approach especially towards the
issue of the fight against illicit brews and alcoholism was the reason this
fight always kept re-emerging after sometime.
She pointed out stigmatisation
as the main obstacle that hindered the success of this fight.
“The community is so harsh on the alcoholics and their
brewers to the point that they fear coming up in the open to seek for help. This
in turn leads them to either drowning themselves deeper into the menace or some
resulting to suicide due to untreated depression,” she said.
She called on the authorities to endeavour in actualising of
the concept of ‘Nyumba Kumi’ to make it more relevant in developing local
solutions to local problems.
“Every problem is usually caused by something and more often
than not, the problem we see is a symptom of something else. We should seek to
identify the source of the problem first, anticipate possible barriers and
obstacles before they might rise up and then develop the best action steps for addressing the problem, as a community,”
Chania said.
“Some problems may
not only have more than one reason, they may have more than one solution too.
Problems often call for multi-pronged solutions. That is, difficult problems
often must be approached from more than one direction.”
She appealed to the people to be more responsible especially
when it came to the issue of alcohol.
“If we want our children to grow in good morals, we must
respect the family institution first,” she said.
She reaffirmed her resolve to vie for the Women Rep seat
come 2017 and wooed the congregation to vote for her so as to enable her to
serve them better and in a bigger capacity.
She also donated foodstuffs, shoes and confectioneries to the elderly and needy children in the area.
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