Garissa — Defying elders who flatly reject western culture, youth in northeastern Kenya are resisting efforts by spiritual leaders to ban social media.
A rising literacy rate, an aggressive push by telecommunication companies to invest in the region, and a sharpened appetite for social networking sites is changing the cultural equation in Kenya's North Eastern province, a trend that opinion shapers are tracking with keen interest.
From helping to organize youth meetings, to enabling distance learning, to connect locals with their counterparts elsewhere, social media is breathing new life into the region, a trend some believe could catapult a parched, politically troubled area into a new economic frontier. The challenges, however, remain enormous.
Thirty people were arrested in Garissa on 13 October, following violent clashes over land rights, a longstanding problem.
Also this week, aid agencies curtailed their work at the sprawling Dadaab camp - which houses nearly half a million refugees fleeing famine and fighting in nearby Somalia - following the abduction of two Spanish workers of Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders). The kidnapping of the women is the third time in two months that armed men have seized foreigners in the area.
A Shifting Social Landscape
Despite the tensions surrounding them, young people 's lives are changing. Take 29-year-old Mohamed Ali Sheikh. A database assistant working with the Millennium Village project at Dertu, an experiment aimed at making development work, Sheikh says that after leaving the office at 5.00 p.m. he explores social networking sites until 2.00 a.m.
Social media has meant new community engagement for the information and communication technology (ICT) worker, who sports an E63 Nokia phone with an aquatic keyboard. He tutors a group of teachers who signed up for ICT classes at a local school, and they, in turn, plan to pass on the technology skills they learn to others.
But Sheikh's main involvement is with youths. He mobilizes young people for weekly meetings to discuss issues affecting their community.
"I have created some youth groups from my community who are connected to social sites," he says. "I invite them every Sunday evening to discuss our development agenda."
The youths tackle issues such as the persistent drought crisis, leadership, nutrition, abstinence, the threat of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) and HIV, and the use of contraceptives, as well as environmental protection.
"We also have Islamic pages where the youth interact and reflect on our religion and guide us along the moral path," says Sheikh.
Although he uses a modem to connect him to the Internet at work, he spends as little as 20 Kenyan shillings (about 19 U.S. cents) per hour to the network through his phone. "My phone has an application program that enables me to open my mails and send attachments through the mailbox. It also has browsers like Opera," he says.
New Aids to Education
While Sheikh and his cohorts are getting a taste of social freedom on a local front, others, like Aden Khalif, have discovered expression through a global audience and long-distance learning.
The 24-year-old former Kampala International University (KIU) student from Masalani, a remote shopping area south of Garissa town, has a blog as well as Twitter, MySpace and Facebook pages.
During his campus days, Khalif says, he found it difficult to deliver assignments while on long holidays, because there was no Internet access in his village. Then, in 2007, a government-led initiative, the Digital Village Project, established an ICT center at Masalani.
The center's technology services are provided by Mwaki Systems, a social enterprise that has brought the community a range of services, such as computer training, Internet access, and use of digital cameras, printers and fax machines.
"I would be forced to travel to Garissa town, about 120 miles away by road, to access Internet services," says Khalif, who completed his university education last May. "But after this facility was established I would receive assignments, work on them and then send them back to [school] from here."
Khalif uses his spare time to teach children in his village to use the Facebook and Nimbus sites. His efforts have netted him online friends from as far away as Mauritius and India, an opportunity he has come to treasure.
Sheikh has discovered that social media is also bridging the literacy gap. He says he has been volunteering to connect the literate youth in his village with the semi-literate and the illiterate. The mingling of these three groups is helping the community understand the problems affecting the younger generation, says Sheikh, and helps young people pool very different kinds of knowledge to solve common problems.
"For instance, the learned youth and the semi-learned ones will plan how to achieve a development goal, while illiterate youth will talk about the cattle they are herding. This helps them bridge the society divide," he says.
A Cultural Clash
But new-found social freedom must contend with culture and tradition.
Ismail Abdikadir Salat of the Garissa-based G Youth Group says some Islamic leaders are opposed to social media because of what they claim is the technology's ability to cause moral decay and insecurity. Ismail, who also represents North Eastern Kenya at the U.S. Embassy-sponsored national steering committee of the National Youth Forum, says resistance to new media is especially widespread among local leaders in Mandera.
Ismail says the use of social media has a dual effect on society. "If it is accessible to criminals, social media can be used negatively, like recruiting the youth into the Al Shabaab movement," he says.
Kenyan and international development officials suspect that Al Shabaab is behind the area's recent kidnappings. They believe the two Spanish women seized Thursday have been taken across the border into Somalia, where the movement is fighting for control.
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On the other hand, Ismail says, if youths are denied information, they are also prey to negative forces of society. But Khalif Hadi, the Supreme Council of Kenya Muslims (SUPKEM) chairman at the Mandera branch, says the use of new media has resulted in social decay among young people.
In Mandera, Islamic leaders banned all forms of new media, including watching DSTV programmes as well as video shows. "We banned the use of these new technologies because of high rates of school drop outs, negation of duties by the youth, as well as rising cases of childhood pregnancies," says Hadi.
It is unclear how Muslim leaders plan to control consumption of social media, which is now at the palm of the hand for many. According to an AudienceScapes National Survey of Kenya, 68 percent of the population in North Eastern Kenya owned a mobile phone in 2009.
However, 23 percent of those interviewed said phone signals are poor over much of the region. Elijah Mwaniki, founder of the Mwaki Systems Pasha Center in Masalani, Garissa, says digital centers are proving useful for those with limited access to the mobile phone network.
"The objective of Pasha Centers is to bridge the communication gap between Kenyans in the rural and urban areas by offering alternative services," he says.
