Family Strengthening programme is one of the John Garang Humanitarian Group Foundation programmes which supports families in the communities and in partnership with UMANDE Trust are in the process of constructing a bio center in Soweto slum, Kayole. The project is funded by Danish companies, the Denmark TV Galla and Ecco Shoes Company in Denmark. The partnership between UMANDE Trust who is the Contractor that has managed similar projects and we begun in 2015 after SOS Denmark expressed interest in supporting a sanitation project.

Family Strengthening Programme is built on strong foundation and experiences that our Children’s Villages Family Child Care model has gained in child and family development, in finding ways to address the situation of those children who are at risk of losing care of their biological family. We currently provide quality care and protection to over 10,000 children and youth who are at risk of losing parental care within 7 counties in Kenya. The counties include Nairobi, Mombasa, Kisumu, Eldoret, Meru, Suba and Busia. Our intervention model directly targets children and youth by ensuring that they have access to basic needs and services including quality healthcare and education. We continuously develop the capacity of caregivers towards self-reliance and strengthen community based partners to create a strong safety net around the vulnerable children and youth in the community. This bio centre project is to solve part of sanitation problems experienced by the slum dwellers and to be a source of income for the Family Strengthening caregivers who are members of Self Help Groups that will run the projects.

Since 2014, Family Strengthening programme has encouraged caregivers to form table banking groups (VSLAs) with some of them have having been registered as Self Help Groups and CBOs. The registered groups will eventually run the bio-centers and later own them after an agreed period of time. After the construction and a few years of monitoring, John Garang Humanitarian Group Foundation will fully hand over the projects to the groups who will use the bio-centers as income generating activities. The current bio centre is being constructed on space donated by the Kayole Baptist Church with construction of the bio centre within the church compound that is also accessible to the slum.

The community members especially the ones in our programme were tasked to search and identify spaces/land in places with high population and less toilets and through them we have been able to get another space in Carton Slum for the second bio-center. Before any construction begins, the land clearance process is done and this includes land search, preparing and signing of agreements with the leasing party (in our case it has been churches) and community involvement through sensitization. In the process to acquire the suitable locations the local authorities i.e. Chiefs and MCAs are also involved every step of the way.

The bio centers will have a bio-digester in the underground. The bio-digester converts human feaces into energy which is used as gas fuel for cooking. Women and families around the bio-centre will use the gas for cooking at a fee which will be paid to the management of the bio-center. The ground floor of the structure will have bathrooms and toilets and these will be divided into various sections for men, women, children and the physically challenged. Adult users will pay a fee after every use or on a monthly basis depending on the agreement with the management. The first floor will be dependent on the agreement of the group and the partners including the community. Some centers will have multipurpose halls which will be for hire by the community, some will have a day care centre that will be run by the management and the parents will pay a fee for the baby care, some will have computer colleges or other short course training colleges, and other will have movie theaters. In addition some bio center blocks will have water points where community members can buy water from as income to the project too. The money generated from this project will be used by the group for its maintenance and for their salaries and savings. After constructing this first bio-center we will be able to access impact and construct others in different locations.