iBUILD, Maa Trust in a drive to promote youth employment

The Maa Trust, a community based organisation in the Maasai Mara has partnered with iBUILD in a move aimed at training to empower the youth in the Kenya’s Mara area – with the initiative’s long-term goal meant to offer Employment opportunities for Maasai youth.

This section of Maasai society is currently facing great uncertainty as a result of not owning land in a largely pastoral community. This move is seen as a sure bet in getting out the target group from languishing into poverty with Maa Trust holding key to their survival as it focuses on empowering women, youth and children.

The Maa Trust will work with iBUILD to coordinate construction training and employment opportunities for youth aged 18-35. This culmination of effort will build up a strong and empowered young Maasai generation that will be able to pull themselves and their families out of poverty.

The multi-prong intervention has firstly set up the Maa Bricks social enterprise, with the support and expertise of the iBUILD team, the project has already trained 38 youth in the production of compressed soil eco-bricks to be used for environmentally sustainable construction projects and affordable housing. Maa Bricks will greatly reduce the environmental impact of construction work.

In summer 2016, in cooperation with The Maa Trust, volunteers from iBUILD worked to construct the first mud brick demonstration house, including inexpensive solar technology to provide enough energy for basic lighting and cell phone charging.

To dramatically improve the indoor air quality for the family living inside of the new Maasai home, a simple biogas operation was installed for gas flame cooking so that open fires were no longer needed inside the home. The completion of this first concept home with the bricks made by Maasai youth has generated much excitement and interest not only for these new career opportunities for youth but also for the opportunity for the next generation of Maasai to live in modernized yet affordable housing.

IBUILD provide the instrumental project management and human resource component central to the Maa Bricks effort. The iBUILD platform brings together the contractors and workers to accomplish hiring, skills rating, time sheet tracking and weekly construction crew payments for brick-making and skilled labor.

Further, material purchases and deliveries can be organized through the app. A historical record of payments for all of these transactions are organized for each project and workers will have a track record of their payments and an electronic record of work experience and ratings available for free, all via the iBUILD app.

The Maa Bricks program is currently working on an order of 110,000 bricks to construct the new Maa Empowerment Hub which includes an IT hub, which will be used for training youth and teachers in IT skills.

The geographical area in which The Maa Trust operates currently has a population of 40,000 people, but this is rapidly increasing. This is a pilot programme for youth empowerment amongst the Maasai and once proven successful, it can easily be scaled up across Maasailand and elsewhere in rural East Africa as an example of environmentally sustainable development. Maa Bricks will be expanded over the next 10 years to cover the whole of Narok District, which has a population of 1 million people.

Young Maasai people have a passion and commitment to advance themselves and their communities. They have seen the hardships that their parents experience, and they desire a different future. Despite this, the Maasai culture is extremely important to the youth and they are determined that development will not erode this, or their connection to wildlife which is an inextricable part of the Maasai culture. With the current 10.5 per cent population growth rate, the human resource within the Maasai Mara is vast.

Currently 66per cent of the population are under the age of 16. Children and young people are all desperately seeking ways to improve their education and secure employment.

Sustainable development calls for the improvement of communities in a way that is environmentally sensitive and does not negatively affect future generations.

It is essential for such interventions to be culturally appropriate. This youth empowerment programme will economically benefit the Maasai community by supporting young people to attain better grades in school, pursue further training opportunities, and secure employment.

This will result in the diversification of livelihoods in the Maasai Mara which is essential to address the environmental challenges created when pastoral communities have high population growth rates and try to increase livestock holdings well above carrying capacity in an attempt to support their families.  IBUILD is proud to be working together with The Maa Trust in this exemplary youth training effort as part of its Corporate Social Responsibility program.