Jenga Future, a nonprofit organization in Kenya’s Rift Valley, was founded to play a part in the climate change fight. Jackson Kiptanui, the innovations director at Jenga Future, spoke to us about Jenga Future’s community-led approach, its focus on inclusive economic development, and their use of RQI’s Question Formulation Technique to help rural youth advocate for change.
Our conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Why did you found Jenga Future and what is the mission of the organization?
Jenga Future is an organization aimed at helping people facing climate issues or other community challenges. We wanted to build resilience and help communities adapt to change, such as changes in technology. We also work with indigenous communities on land issues, and youth in rural areas, with an emphasis on gender inclusion.
When we founded the organization we decided to focus primarily on two areas: climate technologies and technology inclusion. For technology inclusion, for example, we constructed a computer lab for students with physical disabilities. For climate technology, we have trained young people on climate change, specifically on climate technologies.
There was no organization aimed at allowing the community to create the solutions themselves; people were used to having someone solve their problems. We needed a new approach to problem-solving at scale. Our role would be as guides.
Why did you decide to focus on community co-creation?
Co-creation has been key for us because we believe the solutions are found within the community. We tend to superimpose our solutions to the community, but community members understand their problems, their challenges, and they understand their solutions.
What we do is facilitate empowerment.
In one particular case, we were training about 20 young people on regeneration, agriculture and agroforestry. The young people were from a ward that had a lot of problems with landslides, which result in loss of property, loss of food, even loss of life. So we decided to challenge the students to find solutions they could implement within the community. They did a survey and everyone was aligned to the need to do agroforestry, specifically focused on coffee as the preferred case crop because it does well in the area.
Through the support of a couple of donors, we distributed about 3,500 trees for the community to create nurseries. Trees help hold the soil, which reduces the possibility of landslides. It creates income for the community which means they can send their kids to school. With enough trees, we can create a factory for coffee processing, and the community can package their coffee and sell it.
Even the computer lab that we built for the students was a co-created solution. The design of the lab came from students and teachers. For example, they took into consideration how wheelchairs need to have a certain amount of space to turn. That is the power of co-creation.
What made you interested in RQI’s methods?
I’m a big believer in questions. So I was drawn to the Question Formulation Technique (QFT) in the first place because I wanted to learn, how do I myself ask better questions? When you ask good questions, you get good answers, and it reduces the amount of unnecessary information. It can be extended even to entrepreneurship, because good ideas also come from asking good questions. And I thought, people should learn how to ask questions. It requires practice.
And then once I learned the QFT, I thought, why not try it with other people?
We live in a society where we’ve not been taught how to ask questions. Your job is to just follow, and the leaders and elders will tell you what to do. People might take asking questions as rude. Or when a younger person asks an older person a question, it might be viewed as disrespect. It has brought us to a culture where people fear asking questions.
So I was interested in how asking questions can build confidence in students and youth from a young age.
How did you use the Question Formulation Technique (QFT)?
When we were handing over the coffee seeds to the young people in the community, we also ran a workshop using the QFT. We were interested in having them play a key role in developing solutions to community problems. Their community is prone to landslides because of changing rain patterns. We wanted to give them a problem that was affecting them directly, so we used the Question Focus: “Landslides are more common in our community now than in the past.”
I used a facilitator guide, which made my work easy. The participants had some difficulty at first. They were slow to get started generating questions. But as we continued they came up with so many questions that I had to stop them to move on to the next step.
What was the impact on participants?
What I noticed about the participants was we started on a very low confidence level. They could not formulate questions easily. As the session continued, they grew in confidence, and by the time we were ending the training, the room was quite lively. The concepts were clicking.
It’s like they were using the muscle of asking questions afresh. It’s a muscle they were not used to using. So then they realized, okay, we can ask questions, and asking questions became easier for them.
That was the “aha” moment – the participants felt like this was a new approach. They were not used to using questions to clarify their ideas. They understood that they can use questions to go deeper into problems and also find solutions to those problems. Some of them were trying it out, clarifying issues using questions after the workshop.
As young people, they wanted to use the approach with their community’s leaders. One participant said he will be trying to write questions down so when they go to community meetings they can ask good questions.
I’m quite happy to report that a few months ago, they managed to invite their MP, their member of Parliament, to have a discussion with them.
Wow.
Yeah, even I was surprised! I didn’t know they could go to that extent. So they invited their MP and they had very good discussions about their challenges in the community and how the MP could assist them and what the government needs to look into.
I think the training contributed to increase their confidence in terms of asking good questions. They were confident enough to be able to ask these questions. They did their civic duty.
We used the QFT to assist young people to ask questions about climate change. What better way to put issues related to climate change at the forefront of the conversation? If we don’t adapt, we might be wiped out by poverty. We have to be involved in educating our communities, and they have to hold officials accountable, in meetings in which people use questions and set the agenda.
What is something that you wish other people knew about the work you do?
I wish that people would take seriously how climate change has affected third world countries. People don’t know the extent that people in rural areas are suffering. The rain patterns have changed, meaning they cannot grow food for a living. So rural communities have become poorer. I wish there was more support to the Global South for climate change adaptation, as well as mitigation.
Our dream is to have a productive rural economy, meaning people can grow food economically in a more sustainable way, and make a living.
Young people in Kenya’s Rift Valley reflect on using the QFT:
- “I learned that it is important to ask the right question so that we can get to the root cause of the issue and come up with the right solution”
- “[I can use what I learned] to increase and enhance how I can engage with the community and interact with people in daily activity”
- “We have so many narratives and discussions going on about issues of climate change. It is important to engage the community with the right question so that we can get to the real issue and activate solutions to the problem.”
- “I am now empowered to inquire and disseminate information the better way for a higher engagement and finding more information in a question.”
- “Advocating for the community is key and needs to start somewhere”
- “[I learned] the importance of asking the right questions and knowing how to put questions to get the desired response.”
- “I have learned that asking questions correctly can help to get information about climate change and advocating for my community.”
“This training is really important because it helped us to know that asking the right questions will lead to the right solutions. It will also help us to help someone else. In this area there is climate change and we are really feeling the impacts. We have a mandate to ensure our communities don’t go further into distress. I think all of us have a role to play.”
— Session participant, Jenga Future, Kenya