Alice Ni (NYU Gallatin) | Nubian Rights Forum | Nairobi, Kenya
The most significant insight that I gained from my experience at work this week was the logistical and administrative aspects of human rights NGOs from learning more about the history of the Nubian Rights Forum, the timeline of implementation of their programs, and their relationship with Namati, a young NGO headquartered in Washington DC. Since my last blog post, I’ve spent more time in meetings, both virtually and in person, with potential partners and also our donor organization, Namati. I have been primarily working under the communications officer at Nubian Rights Forum, and the main focus of my job for the past month has been focused on communicating with a public audience and cultivating the public image of the organization via updates on our website and various forms of social media.
At the beginning of the month, Vivek Maru, the CEO of Namati, came to visit our main office in Kibera for an update. It was during that meeting that I learned that many of the core programs carried out by the Nubian Rights Forum were implemented in tandem with Namati and their framework of grassroots legal empowerment, such as the Citizenship Paralegal program and the Biryani Fridays.
Nubian Rights Forum was initially founded in 1997 and focused primarily on land rights. After the US embassy bombings in Nairobi in 1998, however, the government began to target Muslim ethnic groups for identification vetting in the name of national security. There had been informal vetting of the Nubians before this date, but after 1998 the vetting process was acknowledged and justified as a necessary procedure by the government. As a result, the focus of the Nubian Rights Forum gradually shifted towards securing individual rights for community members, as ID cards are necessary to be able to function and participate in Kenyan society. In 2013, Nubian Rights Forum began its partnership with Namati through its Grassroots Legal Empowerment program. Through this partnership, Nubian Rights Forum established its flagship citizen paralegal program, its most publicized and well-developed program currently.
Nubian Rights Forum has a very close relationship with Namati, as they are both located in Nairobi, and there is a lot of mobility of personnel between the two organizations. Mustafa Mahmoud, initially the program director at Nubian Rights Forum, became a co-founder and a co-director at the Nairobi division of Namati in 2013. Namati considers the experience gained by the Nubian Rights Forum from on-the-ground activism to further refine their program frameworks that are also used in different branches located in other countries. Nubian Rights Forum has a wide leeway to determine the specific details of the implementation of the broader directives established by Namati, submitting periodic reports to update their progress. Namati financially supports various proposals initiated by the Nubian Rights Forum, such as Biryani Fridays, where paralegals learn about laws and sections of the Constitution about citizenship and identification rights in the morning, with Biryani for lunch to encourage enthusiasm and participation for the legal enrichment.
Namati also helps coordinate the contact of the Nubian Rights Forum with local news media and other parties for publicity. Near the end of the month, I attended the two-day Media Workshop on Citizenship and Digital Identity held by Namati, which brought together journalists and stakeholders on issues of citizenship rights such as the Nubian Rights Forum, giving stakeholders a platform to share their experiences to a broad audience through the journalists and their publishers. Nubian Rights Forum’s program director, Zena Musa, spoke in this workshop on behalf of the Nubian Rights Forum to present the Nubian experience of identification discrimination in Kibera, and an article covering this conference was published on the largest media network in Kenya, Citizen Digital.