What We'll Be Doing in Kenya & Uganda

From June 25th through July 5th I'll be in Kenya and Uganda with Jess Shorland and Bob Phoenix. The purpose of our trip is to:

1. Visit the non-profits that The Humanity Campaign and iContact have provided funds to in order to see and document how they are using the funds and to learn about their operations and needs;
2. Find additional qualified non-profits for The Humanity Campaign to invest in;
3. Find companies with unique innovative technologies that address local social needs and for-profit companies with a social mission to invest in;
   
4. Learn as much as we can about conflict resolution, IDP camps, food and water distribution, rural health care provision, and rural primary and secondary education; and
   
5. Dance, dance, and dance some more like Matt from Where The Hell is Matt!

On our first day in Nairobi we'll be meeting with Amon Anderson from the Acumen Fund and Mary Muhara from Africa Rising. Amon is a friend of mine from back when we went to UNC together and from when he was in charge of the entrepreneurship minor at UNC. Mary is the in-country local representative for Africa Rising who vets the non-profits that Africa Rising contributes to. Mary will be taking us to visit TULIP Nairobi a program supported by AR. TULIP "strives to deliver hope for girls subjected to poverty and its vices: teenage pregnancies, HIV/AIDS, drugs, crime, and prostitution."

On day two in Nairobi we'll be visiting with Carolina for Kibera. CFK works in Kibera, a slum in North Nairobi to "promote youth leadership and ethnic and gender cooperation in Kibera through sports, young women's empowerment, and community development." CFK was started in 2001 by a UNC students Kim Chapman and Rye Barcott. Rye has since completed five years of service as an officer in the Marines and completed a MBA/MPA joint degree from HBS and the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, which is what I'd love to be doing in a few years. They operate a soccer league, medical clinic (Tabitha Clinic), and a reproductive health and women's rights center (Binti Pamoja). I'm so excited to be seeing their operation first hand.

On day three, we'll be flying from Nairobi's Jomo Kenyatta Airport to Entebbe, Uganda. We'll stay the night in Kampala with our friend Louis Ntale, the brother-in-law of Duke's Christopher Kigongo, and then wake up early to catch the five or six hour Posta Uganda bus from Kampala to Gulu and traverse once again the adventurous roads of rural Uganda.

Upon arriving in Gulu we'll be meeting up with Andrew Morgan of Invisible Children. Over the past year I have been studying the conflict between the LRA, led by Joseph Kony, and the Ugandan army known as the Ugandan People's Defence Force and formerly known as the National Resistance Army.

Invisible Children (IC) is working to put an end to the conflict, which has died down considerably in Northern Uganda but spread to the Central African Republic and the Northeast Democratic Republic of Congo, near the Garamba Forest. IC also working to re-integrate and educate former LRA child soldiers in the surrounding region's Internally Displaced Person's camps and to lobby the U.S. government to put State Department resources into ending the conflict. I had the chance to spend a couple days with their CEO Ben Keesey and co-founder Bobby Bailey while at The Summit Series trip in Aspen in April. They've put out a series of very well done DVD documentaries explaining the conflict and highlighting the stories of particular child soldiers. I'm very excited to see the IC operation while in Gulu.

After a day with IC, we'll be visiting the Concerned Parents Association, another organization supported by Africa Rising, which mobilises parents of abducted children toward the objectives of:

1. Immediate and unconditional release of all abducted children
   
   
2. Peaceful resolution of the conflicts
   
   
3. Creation of an awareness of the plight of children in conflict

After three days in Gulu, we'll head back down to Kampala on July 1st, visit with Joseph of Appfrica, and stay the night again with Louis. On Thursday, July 2nd we'll have one free day and either head to the Kampala Hospital, do a follow-up visit with the Kyetume health clinic an hour away in Nkokonjeru, or head over to Jinja to see the source of the Nile.

On Friday we'll head over to Mityana, Uganda to visit the Naama Millennium School and get an update on the scholarship program that iContact and The Humanity Campaign have funded that will be helping students at Naama attend secondary school. We'll also be visiting a team from Duke and Nourish International. Naama serves 321 students, 113 of which have lost one or both parents. It was a true joy last year visiting Naama and seeing the school children dance!

After visiting Naama we'll visit the Mityana Secondary School. One of my favorite memories from the visit last June was sitting in on an entrepreneurship class and seeing first hand the drive in the students to excel.

On our final day, Bob and I will head back to Kampala to fly to Nairobi and then back to RDU through Heathrow and JFK to be back in time for work on Monday morning July 6. Jess will continue on and head down to Karegwe, Tanzania to work with Juma Masisi at WOMEDA, a women's rights organization.

I look forward to blogging about our experiences! Stay tuned.