Regularly, we invite our colleagues from Boehringer Ingelheim to one week Making More Health insights weeks in Kenya. Why? Simply to make them experience what you can never realize and understand while sitting in your offices or reading articles and presentation slides.

Experiencing and interacting with vulnerable communities is key! As human beings we tend to simplify and focus on specific topics without seeing the interconnections, we tend to offer solutions on what WE think is important without taking into account how to make it really theirs. We invest in projects and less in relationship building which often leads to a lack in long term sustainability.

Often we don’t see because we simply don’t know. E.g that kindergarten teachers have a huge role as first touch points in health, that certain structures might work in different ways (although they have the same name as ours) and who plays a crucial role as local influencer…

We started this week with visiting our center in Langas slum area in Eldoret, interacted with self help groups, visited a women prison, played soccer with them, learned about challenges of health structures and met people who are not able to pay even the bus to go to a doctor, saw the impact of bumpy roads and the impact of heavy rains… In our center in Webuye now we are interacting with governmental representatives, meet different influencers from church, teachers and incredible local changemakers as @Maryana who launches the first platform for missing children all across Kenya and neighboring countries and have been seeing drones landing to bring anti rabies vaccines… we are just in the middle of the week. Every day there are added a lot of other „puzzle pieces“ of experience, pieces which change or way how to look at vulnerable communities, on health, on how trust and relationships influence the success of potential solutions.

When our people leave after a week, our mindsets have changed a lot. The way on how to think about more impactful activities, how to make more health happen, how to look differently at other countries and cultures has become much broader and leads to different ways of acting.

If you are interested to come with a group and to experience yourself, to invest in relationship building first, to get deeper insights into impact making and sustainable acting in a way that it makes a real longterm difference for vulnerable communities, feel free to contact.

As Gandhi said: if we do what we did we just get what we got. We should not just do more of it, while just getting more of what we got.

That’s simply not enough!

Real impact is much more than high project- related outreach numbers, more than „isolated“ activities here and there. We need different outcomes. Outcomes that are accepted , led and developed further by vulnerable communities themselves. Outcomes that make a real change happen in our world!