NAAM Festival is a creative activism platform running the #JusticeforLakeVictoria campaign. The pollution and destruction of the Lake's ecosystem is the motivating factor.
A people's meeting on the shores of Lake Victoria (INYANZA), modeled on the Danish "Folkemødet" piloted in February 2023 during the 5th Edition of The NAAM Festival at the lake shores. It featured Peoples' panels on SDGs and Environmental Governance dialogue, knowledge sharing workshops, Artivism exhibitions, Film and Music.
An online and in-person campaign to support solid waste segregation in Nairobi's informal settlements along Nairobi rivers in collaboration with STEPP Project by Portsmouth University, UK.
Supporting the Lake Victoria (INYANZA) leg of the sailing dhow and the first worlds plastic boat made out of tonnes of collected plastic and flipflops along Indian Ocean, the expedition and Flipflopi Naam Lolwe festival of artivisim took the pollution message upstream.
A green product born out of The Oceans Plastics Innovation Challenge, a project sponsored by National Geographic to eliminate plastic bags in Lake Victoria (INYANZA) replacing them by bags made from the locally abundant water hyacinth and other organic material. Thus killing two birds with one stone as both materials are currently choking lakes and rivers across Africa.
A waste-to-art sewing and craft project sponsored by the German Embassy specifically using waste, recycled and second-hand materials to create beautiful accessories that empower women & youth communities to learn valuable new skills for an alternative income in circular economy/culture. These projects fall under our philosophy of Turning Threats into Opportunities. Illustrating the point that things classified as waste are not waste until they’re wasted.
A MOBILIZATION BOOTCAMP BY USAID & AGAKHAN FOUNDATION
Yetu (“Ours” in Kiswahili) is funded by the Aga Khan Foundation and USAID. The Yetu Initiative works with civil society organizations (CSOs) rooted in the communities they serve to advance the principles of self-reliance and locally sustained development.
To ensure sustainability and community ownership, Yetu trains CSOs on how to mobilize local resources – not just money, but in-kind contributions of time and assets. Yetu enables CSOs to build better community engagements, strengthen linkages and trust with like-minded Kenyan organizations, businesses, foundations, governments, and individual citizens. NAAM set up a crowd funding campaign through the Yetu initiative training and powered by a local Mobile Money platform known as Mchanga (Mobile contributions in Kiswahili) helped raise over 18,000$ in cash and kind to win the 4th cash prize of about $4,000 in 2019. These generous contributions help develop the various programs within the NAAM concepts and especially implement the women weaving workshops, the monthly NAAM Hangout Flea Marketand dialogue concerts along with cloth waste collection for the upcycling fashion studio. The crowd funding platform is still running and can be accessed here: ACCESS IT.
The campaign is part of a global solidarity movement to restore our endangered lakes across the world featuring Lake Vellayani (India), Titicaca (Peru) and Victoria (INYANZA) (East Africa). It consists of powerful images and stories of dead or dying lakes from the lens of conscious photographers and shore line communities.
A creative photographic exhibition of the state of the lake and a dialogue forum poised to be a demonstration of how art – and more so, photography – can be used to effect change in the minds of the East African people so that they can be cognizant of the fact that their unchecked use and negligence of Africa’s greatest lake and its catchment area is causing it more harm than good.
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We are a very small team supported by a large group of very dedicated volunteers.
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