From March until the end of 2024, PBI Kenya together with Kayole Community Justice Centre, Kibera Social Justice Centre and the Mathare Network (Ghetto Foundation, Ruaraka Community Justice Centre, Kiamaiko Community Justice Centre and Mathare Social Justice Centre) will set in motion a project to improve relationships and dialogue between HRDs, citizens and security forces in their respective areas. This is supported with German Federal Foreign Office’s funds by ifa (Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen), zivik Funding Programme.
In March, we held a start-up meeting that brought together 15 HRDs from Mathare, Kayole and Kibera. We rolled out the plan for the coming year and did a joint context analysis.
In 2021 and 2022 PBI Kenya implemented the project ‘Raising the voice, visibility and effectiveness of the human rights movement in Kenya’. This followed after the successful completion of the pilot project ‘Increased capacities, stronger networks’. In this project, we aimed to contribute to the strengthening of a community-based movement and enhance the ability of HRDs to handle difficulties like burnout, stress, and conflict, increase their ability to analyse their risks and implement security and protection strategies. We also sought to advance advocacy capacities in order to contribute to their ability to bring issues of human rights violations, and solutions, to the national debate. The project further aims to contribute towards building or improving relationships between social justice centres, local and national authorities -especially the police- and members of the international community, as well as to improve the relationship of social justice centres with community members. The project drew on a close collaboration between the Social Justice Center Working Group and PBI Kenya and sought to sustainably broaden or maintain the civic space and security of the Social Justice Centres. We seek to bring together members of the various Social Justice Centres in Nairobi through different activities, such as risk analysis, capacity building -with specific attention to holistic security management-, and joint and separate advocacy activities on the national and international levels.
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