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the most vocal groups who are loud to be heard, leaving those most venerable ones to suffer in silence and at times withdrawn to depression.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.