2023 September, 11/12

During the Light Impact conference in Nairobi some of our System Changer Network (SCN) members shared in a panel session about the impact they could achieve through this innovative SCN model of collaboration. The SCN Kenya was launched in 2021, comprising 8 national NGOs/ social enterprises who work directly with underserved communities in Western and Central Kenya.

The idea of the SCN is to tackle the needs in the connected communities more holistically and to solve basic needs in parallel – in the same places: from health to water issues, from education to income generation, from basic business skill transfer to mobility and safety issues, so that a real development and growth of people has a much better chance to be come sustainable.

How we do that?

All SCN members have committed to invest not just in their own projects and activities, but also into the network that they have built and system changer approaches with the aim to share skills, learn together and to accept innovative inputs from outside thus achieving much more than as an “isolated” organisation.

“We all have specific visions and target groups and topics in our organizations, but at the end it’s all about human beings who have a lot of basic needs in different roles along lifetime. Basic needs as Nutrition, water, education are important to all. Needs are interlinked, as also solutions should be interlinked”, explained Manuela Pastore from the Making More Health Initiative when the idea came up.

The SCN alliance is based on exchange strategies and structures on various levels, the active investment of the SCN partners’ own resources in the network, including active knowledge transfer from community to community, and around the SCN a huge “cloud“ of partners from many different backgrounds who engage in several ways and aspects, with changing intensity: social enterprises, volunteering employees, other companies, international NGOs, local governments, Academia…

At the conference some SCN members could also share at booths the work and their specific skills. TENDO is for example an NGO and SCN member, active in Mukuru Slums in Nairobi. They are very strong in income generating activities for vulnerable self help groups. Production, product branding and registration and marketing skills of soap and washing products are now spread in the whole network. At the same time the community benefits from many other skills which come to them through the network, e.g First Aid courses and basic health and hygiene awareness, other income generating ideas, safety training sessions, cultural exchange club participation, water purification and urban farming ideas.

Another interesting fact of the SCN: if co-creation and collaboration are the big trends, then we need also to measure it!

With yearly network analysis methodologies we measure not just the number and quality of all activities and projects and the respective outreach, but also the connection among the SCN partners, the quantity and quality of exchange and roll out, the density. A concrete and visible system index shows where we are with the network, how our activities match against all identified basic needs and give a clear picture about the next strategic steps!

We are proud of what we have achieved and while communicating now also about this approach we welcome any of your comments and thoughts!