kabissa

The Africa Roundtable is coming to Washington, DC! 

I am returning to DC for a brief visit the week of 21-24 May, to represent Kabissa at an NGO Fair at the World Bank on 23 May.

While in DC, where Kabissa was based from 2001-2007, I am organizing an Africa Roundtable lunchtime event as a mini fundraiser for Kabissa and to bring together friends and members interested in Africa for networking and to learn from three wonderful organizations in the local community that are doing innovative and useful work in Africa. 

There is only room for up to 30 people in person and 10 remotely via skype, so register soon to secure your spot! 

Venue, Logistics and Speakers

To secure your spot at the roundtable, please register online as soon as possible by clicking here. You can choose to pay the $10 participation fee online with a credit card or pay later at the venue. Current Kabissa volunteers participate for free! Once you register, you will get an email with more logistics details. 

The Washington International School has graciously agreed to host the event at their Cleveland Park campus on 24 May from 11:15am to 1pm and is providing lunch for participants. We have a tight program so ask that participants arrive promptly at 11:15 to get their lunch and sit down to start the program promptly at 11:30am. Thanks! 

More organizations than we could possibly accommodate stepped forward to be featured at the event but unfortunately we only have time for three presentations. Here are the organizations that will be featured:   

• Jane Meyers, Lubuto Library Project
• Barbara Lee Shaw, Maasai Girls Education Fund
• Barbara Rose, Aid for Africa

Further organizations are of course more than welcome to come and introduce themselves and participate in discussions. There will also be plenty of time for networking when the formal program ends at 1pm. 

Jennifer Lentfer will be live blogging/tweeting the event on the how-matters.org blog. If you wish to tweet the event, please use the #africaroundtable hashtag and let us know at roundtable@kabissa.org - thanks! 

10 participants can participate remotely via Skype, and the event will be recorded to be shared later on the Kabissa website. 

Africa Roundtable Background and Concept

The Africa Roundtable is an initiative of Kabissa to bring together people with a mutual interest in Africa for lightning introductions and to learn from featured speakers. Events combine face to face gatherings in a comfortable, roundtable format with remote participation possible via the Internet. We are experimenting with recording talks by featured speakers to share online afterwards. 

I have hosted three roundtable networking events since February on Bainbridge Island near Seattle - so far they have been both fun and enlightening with featured talks about NGOs working in Ghana, Nigeria, South Africa, and Uganda. 

This is the first roundtable event not hosted on Bainbridge Island and is an experiment (in more than ideal conditions!) to see whether it is desirable to take the concept to other geographic locations. 

You can learn more about past roundtables, subscribe to the Africa Roundtable mailing list and see a typical program at http://www.africaroundtable.org. Contact roundtable@kabissa.org with feedback or suggestions. Thanks!

About the Featured Speakers 

Barbara Lee Shaw, an MBA with 14 years of experience in nonprofit financial management, is the founder and president of the Maasai Girls Education Fund. MGEF works in partnership with the Maasai community in Kenya to raise the status of women and end poverty by educating girls, women, and the Maasai community. 

Jane Meyers is a professional librarian and the founder and president of the Lubuto Library Project, an award-winning organization that is unique in showing the role that public libraries can play in national development and in helping nations achieve their policy objectives and Millenium Development Goals.

Barbara Alison Rose is the founder and executive director of Aid for Africa, a unique alliance of U.S.-based charities and their African partners dedicated to helping children, families, and communities throughout Sub-Saharan Africa. Its grassroots programs focus on health, education, economic development, arts & culture, conservation, and wildlife protection in Africa.

Program

• Skype participants come online and join the roundtable (starting at 11:15)
• Get lunch, sign in and settle in (11:15 - 11:45)
• Lightning round of introductions (11:45 - 11:50)
• Introductory comments by WIS staff (11:50-11:55)
• Welcome and introduction to roundtable by Tobias Eigen (11:55 - 12:00)
• Featured speaker 1 - Barbara Rose, Aid for Africa (12:00 -12:20)
• Featured speaker 2 - Barbara Lee Shaw, Maasai Girls Education Fund (12:20 - 12:40)
• Featured speaker 3 - Jane Meyers, Lubuto (12:40 - 13:00)
• Closing comments by Tobias Eigen (13:00 - 13:05)
• Free networking and chatting (13:05 - 13:30)  

Participants List 

The final participants list will be published here after the event. In the meantime you can access it at www.kabissa.org/civicrm/event/info?reset=1&id=17

I want to share the below small extract with you from some notes I wrote a few years ago when Pakistan was going through an internal crisis. I firmly believe in the goodness of mankind and believe that if we all come together and tap into that good part of our hearts we can make the world a better place and ensure that no individual goes to sleep at night hungry, homeless or without a family.

By joining the Kabissa Family as the Membership Manager I want to help make a difference in Africa as I have been trying to do in Pakistan and hope that you all will help and support me and we all can come together to make a difference.

"Imagine for one single second that your life is under threat and in a matter of minutes you have to collect your entire life possessions, your children and flee, leaving behind everything that you cannot carry with you. You have no idea where you are fleeing to and you have no idea if you will ever get to see your home the way it once looked to you. You flee barefoot to a nearby village, where you are housed in a small school class room with another 50 people, with no electricity, no spare clothes and no bedding to sleep on, only to realize that in the hurry and panic to flee your village, you left one of your children behind....

This is just one tragic story of the many refugees who now live in make shift camps in the Mardan District (NWFP). Over the short course of one week, 1.7 million people have been displaced; their lives have been uprooted, changed forever.

Driving through Mardan to a camp site, you can see refugees sleeping and living on the road side next to the railway tracks. They have put up sheets on ropes, tied between 4 trees to make a temporary space for themselves. In 48 degrees centigrade, these people are living on the road side with no floor and no roof as shelter, as they have nowhere else to go.

The area of Takht Bhai - Mardan has numerous schools which are now occupied by refugees. One such school which I visited currently housed 300 people. A room 20ftx20ft in size was occupied by 30 to 60 people, there was no bedding, not even floor mats to sleep on. Children were lying in the heat on the bare floor. The ceiling had 2 fans but no electricity. The women and children told us how they have only one pair of clothing, some were even without shoes. In this school there was only one toilet being shared by 300 people. In a nearby school there were 2,000 refugees with only 2 toilets to share. The local villagers had been providing the school with food once a day, however this is expected to last only a few more days as the locals there do not have the means to provide food for an extended period of time. Visiting 2 other schools in Mardan (one housing 300 refugees and one housing 900 refugees), the situation there was slightly better; they had floor mats to sleep on and electricity to run some fans. However, here too, the refugees came wearing only one pair of clothing, because of which skin diseases were now rampant in the camps. A lack of sanitation and hygiene is leading to break outs of diarrhea amongst the children who are most vulnerable and as the heat intensifies, the situation is expected to get much worse.

The people of Mardan have opened their hearts and homes to these refugees, however it is not enough. There is a lot more to be done in order to avoid a human catastrophe. No fellow human being deserves to live in such deplorable conditions and it is up to us, as individuals and as fellow human beings to step up and make a difference"

Would you like to be an instrument for change in Africa?

Kabissa is now seeking potential candidates for its volunteering opportunities:

• Membership Manager whose work shall be in managing and handling community correspondence and sign-ups and providing technical support to members.
• Member Content Editor who shall be responsible for polishing posts, comments and content of the Kabissa website as well as in providing encouragement to members seeking to post in the site wide blog and in “hunting” spams.
• Social Network Outreach who shall spread the content relevant to Kabissa on sites like Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin.

More than the education, training, experience and motivation that we would usually see in most of our volunteers’ applicantions, we are in search of candidates who have the commitment and heart for volunteering and the passion and love for online networking for a cause.

If you are a cut for volunteerism and have the fervor for helping people or if you would know persons who have that same enthusiasm, you can be that instrument for change.

To apply and learn more of this opportunity, please visit www.kabissa.org/about/volunteering

Wilfred B. Sinay
Volunteer Recruiter 

I posted the video of the Africa Roundtable featuring Lumana to my Screencast.com account (direct link: http://www.screencast.com/t/7cUij9Cx1) for the benefit of participants who want to refresh their memory of what was discussed at the event and for others who were not able to attend and want to see Sammie Rayner's very interesting talk about Lumana Credit's work in Ghana and get to know the other participants. I also included below the list of participants - a great group of people that I look forward to meeting again soon. I apologize for the poor quality of the recording - we will do better next time, I promise (see lessons learned at bottom). 

Registration for the next Africa Roundtable on April 6, this time featuring Kabissa, is now open! Click here to register immediately or here for more info about the roundtable before registering. Hope to see you there!