Crowd Sourced Journalism-A newdimension in Kenyan Media

TITLE: Secure neighborhoods Kenya

A Brief Background

Insecurity has always been a slippery affair that subsequent regimes have for a long time failed to address, but only handle it with kid gloves and successfully fail to nip the vice at the bud.

Murang’a County is located in Central Kenya.  Here, insecurity thrives.

Cases of motorcyclists losing their motorbikes, and sadly their lives are a near daily occurrence in this locality. Motorists are neither spared by a wave of robbery that has swept Murang’a County over the last few years.

Vigilante groups and unlawful formations continue to guard this area, for a fee, thus giving extortionist gangs like the dreaded Mungiki gang, a field day as they collect what they call “protection fees” from all and sundry, from the motorists, to motorbike taxis, commonly referred to as bodaboda, to businessmen and to the impoverished residents, despite police presence in the area.

As we take a walk into the lush green and hilly landscape of Kamune village at the heart of Mathioya District, we realize that the number of people has greatly reduced to just a few, and the graves have soared in numbers, presumably bearing the remains of the young men who lose their lives to robbery, many of whom are bodaboda operators.

At the Keni bus stop along the Murang’a –Kiria-ini road dozens of bodaboda operators are whiling away waiting for passengers, and on sighting us, they abandon whatever they are doing and ambush us, offering  to ferry us with their bikes to wherever we wished to go, of course for a dime.

After the usual pleasantries we   set out to ask them about the security situation in the area, and in their place of work. At this point, most of them are suddenly disinterested, and look at us suspiciously. In this locality, we are told, no one dares talk about insecurity fearing repercussions from the prime perpetrators of robbery and violence, The Mungiki, who are said to lurk in the area.

We talk to them about the numerous deaths that have been meted to bodaboda operators in the area, their disappearance and how they are later discovered in thickets with parts of their bodies chopped off their badly mutilated bodies,and that’s when they become interested.           

After some minutes the whole group is now surrounding us and narrating to us chilling details of how that happened to their colleagues, how they remained vulnerable to robberies. They live in fear, we learn.

They tell us how the police tried to ease the situation by providing emergency numbers  in case they cited a suspect, or in case they were in trouble, but years down the line, the problem persists.

There is need for a bottom to top approach that will incorporate and revolve on the participation of the local community that will reflect on the security situation of this part of the country.

Objectives

SENEKEN is a combination of abbreviations derived from the words, Secure Neighborhoods Kenya, which is a crowd sourcing platform that seeks to collect data from Murang’a residents for several months, Say from October- December, and come up with a conclusive report of how the bikes are stolen and the number of operators who are killed as a result in given neighborhood. 

For instance, x number of operators go missing every month, and out of those y/100 meet their death

To achieve this all the bikes at Keni stage will be fitted with Global Positioning System devices which will communicate with a small SENEKEN nerve center .Monitors at the nerve center will track the marked bikes on a 24/7 basis. Operators will then be given numbers which they can call in case of any robbery.

A qualitative analysis of the bodaboda s in the monitor list will be done after every month.

The analysis will give details of where the stolen bikes are smuggled to , and the operators will be asked the number plates of the bikes which have gone missing, after which the police will liaise with Seneken to net the culprits.

This data will be invaluable to journalists in the area who were greatly interested with this project.

The provincial administration and the Police in area were also enthusiastic about the platform and vowed to work with us.

The local community is the largest beneficiary of this project since robbery will be wiped out of their neighborhoods

Crowd sourcing tools

Several crowd sourcing tools have been used by the police and the media, which included the use of an emergency number provided to operators to alert police whenever they encountered thugs or problems

Another tool used was the community policing approach where police told locals to report cases of violence but sadly, the two approaches failed to gain any fruits, in particular was the second approach where locals feared repercussions  if the perpetrators ever knew about them, including the  threat of death.

This was a major challenge that made the two approaches fail.

To effectively deal with the shortcoming, SENEKEN intends to use short message services, SMS where a monitoring center for analyzing the SMSes will be set up.

The smses will be sent by the operators in case a bike goes missing, after which the specific bike is put under surveillance.

Safaricom, Airtel, Orange and Yu, all mobile phone service subscribers, will provide a short number for SMSes like 4040, which everyone will use to send the messages.

Expected results

After sometime, the number of robberies will significantly go down after the capture of many robbers by the police

The security situation in the area will hugely improve

The Kenya police will be empowered to act swiftly and precisely in case of any theft

Secure neighborhoods will emerge in the country and people will set up business in the area

Resources needed

-Global positioning devices

-Computers an internet

-Office space complete with stationery

-GPS mast

-Communication lines/wireless phones to reach locals/police/stakeholders

If this project is a success, it will roll to all other parts of the country, which experience similar incidences of insecurity, and will therefore create a working partnership between the police, the local population and the GPS technology to hammer the last nails into the coffin bearing the remains of the vice, INSECURITY.

Editor’s note

This proposal was presented for awards consideration at the The Big Picture Digital Journalism project for the First Crowd sourced Journalism Awards for Africa.
It might not have won any awards but I just wis our politicians could use such approaches to make Kenya a better place to live in.

Special thanks to Murang’a, Mathioya residents for coming out and stating the problem, and to the Big Picture project for inviting me for an awards dinner at the Fairview Hotel in Nairobi, Kenya, where I learnt a lot in this new concept of crowd sourced journalism in Kenya.www.facebook.com/amoxers