He keeps referring to himself as just a missionary trying to understand people’s problems, but Renato Sesana enjoys an unusual popularity for a priest.

Better known as “Father Kizito” to street kids in Africa’s largest slum of Kibera in Nairobi, Sesana has founded many organizations and small companies that help young people escape poverty and crime in Kenya’s slums, where he has been living for 20 years. These include Koinonia in Kenya and its partner organizations in other African countries; Shalom House, a guest house and conference center; and White Gazelle, a travel agency in Nairobi.

The Italian Comboni missionary is also a tireless humanitarian worker. He has a pragmatic view of how development projects should be implemented in Africa, which is manifested in the work of Koinonia. The nonprofit network helps rehabilitate street children and promote self-supportive remunerative activities for disadvantaged youth, including waste collection and recycling.

Sesana’s name is well known to the development and diplomatic community in Nairobi as well as to local authorities and foreign visitors, who can safely walk across the slums in his company.

A freelance journalist, Sesana used to write a weekly column for Kenya’s most widely read newspaper, Daily News. He also started a magazine, radio station, blog and news agency focusing on Africa. He likewise authored 11 books and contributes regularly to newspapers and magazines.

In an interview with Devex, Sesana shared his unique views on Africa’s development, with a particular focus on small projects run by local residents and the importance of improving people’s access to information.

Koinonia is involved in several projects and activities supporting slum residents in Kenya. In your opinion, what is the most crucial one for the development of these poverty-stricken areas?

The work I am most involved in is our project with Kibera’s kids. We have a place there called Ndugu Mdogo Rescue House, which is small but crucial.

Our educators there are amazing. They walk across Kibera and find children in desperate need of help. So we reach the neediest boys in the area. We are trying to extend this work to the girls too, but so far we haven’t been able to do this, as we don’t have a place to shelter them, not even temporarily.

It’s difficult to get aid for this kind of activities as we mostly rely on distance adoptions, for which you need to ensure kids’ stability. But the street kids we find in Kibera are not stable at all. We approach about 80, 100 per year and manage to stabilize only about 30 of them. Many only come twice or three times, and they vanish. Then they come again, and then maybe they move to another slum.

Mobility is huge. When kids are taken by the police and mistreated, they don’t feel safe and change area. Nairobi has over 5 million residents, and it’s easy for a child to become anonymous and get lost in a different neighborhood, in a different situation, which is often even more desperate than the previous one.

It’s difficult to understand if they are orphans. We only get to know their real family situation after one or two years we have dealt with them. Kids in these conditions tend to be extremely reticent, and it takes a long time to win their trust.

I would say [these street children] are never completely abandoned, and this is typical of Africa. They always have some relative they can refer to. Their mother is often alive. Maybe the father is dead, or he left his wife after two or three years they spent together, abandoning her and their children. I would say almost half of these children has a mother and they know where she is, or they have a grandmother or an aunt they can refer to. It’s usually a female relative who takes care of these children. But if they are on the street, it means that this mother or aunt is desperate. Maybe she’s a prostitute, or she lives in extreme poverty; maybe she’s dying from HIV/AIDS and there is nothing she can do for the kids.

Do you get any kind of local financial support for your projects in the city slums, or are they mainly funded from abroad?

We get no support from the Kenyan government. They only sympathize with what we do – and sometimes not even that because we often deal with cases of kids who were beaten by policemen or guardians. Most of our funds come from private donations from Italy and sometimes from Germany.

But it’s really hard. Sometimes we can’t implement our projects. We would like to increase our assistance to street girls for instance, and we can’t because we would need to find and train a young woman who could serve as educator, and we would have to pay her a salary, even if small. We would also have to rent a house for these girls to sleep at night, as an emergency shelter. We have been trying for two years with no success.

Especially now with the global financial crisis, getting funds for these activities is increasingly difficult. But we are optimistic because the effects on kids are so amazing that people who come and visit us and see our educators at work have become our greatest supporters. They see how positive, enthusiastic and lively our kids are. It’s easy to help them because they want to be helped.

We usually take the ones who have just ended up on the street, so they just need a little help to start desiring a future again. Sadly, street kids usually think they have no future because they see people dying young (and) horrible things happening around them. But if you give them a little support, they flourish – and they are wonderful kids. So they are our main testimonials.

We can go on, thanks to the support of people who come to visit us. Tourists come to Kibera maybe because they saw it in movies. They stop by our house, and they see there are children inside. Families of Nairobi-based diplomats also visit us. Some Italian families who want to adopt a child here come for some months and come to see us. These are our supporters – people who are interested in real Kenya, not just beaches and parks, or diplomats and NGO members.

Koinonia doesn’t work under the structure of a non-governmental organization. What kind of organizations did you set up to implement your projects?

Koinonia is not registered as an NGO but simply as a nonprofit association. Most of Koinonia’s staff is not made of development and aid professionals but of people who are motivated by ethical or religious reasons.

Koinonia, though, did create some NGOs. In Kenya, we registered three: One is for street kids, one to help young people through sports and the other one is for the recycling of waste on the street. We also created some small enterprises.

In Kenya, you get a form of “eased” company registration for the so-called “self-help groups,” which applies, for instance, to groups of young people who want to open a small restaurant or a café, or a plastic recycling activity, or something more challenging like a small tourist agency. We help these groups get organized and look for funds from international agencies. We usually think small in this sense. We look into microcredit and help them get started before they can walk on their own feet.

Our longest-lasting success in this field is a waste collection service, which was lacking in Nariobi. We created an association for that in 1998. About 20 young people with an old truck started collecting waste from private house for a small monthly compensation, which has supported them for 11 years now. We try to make people independent; we don’t want to do anything which needs supervision or a guide from outside for a long time. We only assist them at the beginning.

Finding children in desperate need of help in Africa’s biggest slum of Kibera is among the duties of Kizito Sesana’s team, formed by local educators who devoted their life to helping street kids. Photo by: Koinonia

Is this a more effective way to tackle development in Africa?

Based on my experience, although I may be wrong, Africa in general and Kenya in particular is a cemetery for projects, and I’m talking about big ones. We may take a tour of Nairobi’s slums and suburbs just to see dozens, when not hundreds, of failed projects. They lasted for two or three years while they were supported from abroad, and then they crashed for a number of reasons – maybe people did not feel them as their own; local staff was not trained properly; or the responsible NGO was only interested in starting it and taking pictures just to show they had fulfilled their mandate, and they didn’t really care what would happen to the project after they left. As Zambian economist Dambisa Moyo recently wrote, these big projects end up helping dictators and governments, which are inefficient at best and often corrupted.

We don’t think our projects are perfect and work in the best possible way. We also encounter problems and difficulties. But if we start a project, we don’t abandon it halfway just because we have achieved some results or spent our funding. We live within the community and work with people to make the project work. It’s usually a small project, which does not require extraordinary commitment or professional skills so that local people can run it.

We never embark in big projects whose requirements may exceed our possibilities because this has proved effective in our experience. We have seen the results. Maybe our projects only benefit a few dozens of people, but they work and bring dignity and independence to them. This is why I am convinced that small is beautiful when it comes to cooperation. It’s easier to make a small, well-run project work than a big one because you remain side by side with people.

When big projects fail they generate a negative mentality, which is sadly very common across Africa. If I may generalize, Africans who see big projects being kick-started where he or she lives by some major international organization know that it is going to fail because this is what usually happen. Local people, though, would try to get involved in it anyway just to get the maximum personal benefit out of it, maybe even through corruption and other systems. This is why, in my opinion, development projects are way more difficult to implement now than 30 years ago. In the past, those who got involved in these projects still believed they could work.

Kenya’s government does not have a good record when it comes to supporting the work of development organizations in the country. What is your experience in this sense?

I have heard that when great amounts of funds are involved, small state bureaucrats – not the authorities in general – who earn small salaries, like policemen for instance, try to get some profit out of them. So they create obstacles and ask for some money to remove them. This happens very often.

As far as we are concerned though, my presence serves as a deterrent. I am a Catholic priest and churches, not only ours, still enjoy a great deal of respect from people here. Although our religious background is not evident at all, we remain more protected from this kind of problems if compared to others.

Does this mean that projects run by religious movements or organizations are more welcome in the area where you work?

Christian churches, as I said, are still respected. In the early ‘90s, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, many regimes changed in Africa, and in many cases when facing a crisis, governments called bishops from different churches to cover institutional roles or to serve as pacificators. This shows how churches, Christian ones in particular, are among the few organizations which are still held as reliable by people.

Besides Kenya, you have also worked and set up organizations in Zambia and Sudan. What are the differences development workers should be aware of when working in different African countries?

As they say, there is no Africa but many Africas featuring extremely different realities. Differences between Kenya, Zambia and Sudan are maybe greater than those between Sicily and Norway, if we think of Europe.

Realities and traditions have contributed to this phenomenon. Kenya, for instance, is extremely tribalistic. Kenyan society gives a lot of importance to people’s ethnical background, while this is absolutely irrelevant in Zambia when it comes to social relationships. In Sudan, on the contrary, we can talk of racism between people from the Muslim north and those of … south Sudan. These differences can be immediately detected and they should always be taken into account when working in these areas.

Recent history also created major differences. Kenyan society, for instance, is more capitalist and Western-oriented than the other two we mentioned. This has its positive sides as development and the attention devoted to education, especially when it comes to technical subjects, is enormous because this is considered as a way of getting a good job and earn good money. Kenya has a much greater number of technicians, for instance, than Zambia.

There is also a downside to that though, as this interest in making money can generate worse consequences here than in the West. Industrialized countries have lived with this mentality for over two centuries now, while in some African countries, this is a new thing, and societies may not know how to deal with it.

As a journalist, you have written for newspapers, press agencies and magazines both in Europe and in Kenya. Based on your experience, what is the importance of strong and independent media for the development of African countries?

It is a crucial issue. Twenty years ago, I used to say and I still think that Africa’s greatest poverty is not material but concerns the circulation of ideas. Mass media play the crucial role of helping people understand the society they live in and be involved in the issues affecting their own countries, leading to some evident and obvious consequences.

In Kenya, for instance, people from rural areas traditionally vote for the party in power because others have no chance to make their voices heard there. This happens because rural areas are only reached by national shortwave radio, and people only hear the voice of those in power. This has always acted as an obstacle to change in Kenya as in other African countries.

Information has a great importance. If people are not provided with it, they cannot understand what is happening in their own country. But it has to be proper one. In Kenya, for instance, media are technically more developed than in Zambia, but that doesn’t mean that people are better informed because there are various forms of control over information. In Kenya, nobody knows how much the government spends on defense, the army and weapons. The press does not have the strength nor the abilities to properly inform readers on this issue. So there is still a long way to go – and this goes along with the spread of education because the media are useless or limited in their function if people cannot read or write.

This is why in all the countries where we have worked, radio is of crucial importance. Many people can’t afford to buy newspapers or books when they have been to school, and radio is their only source of information. They are of common use, cheap and work with just a couple of batteries. People can listen to them for a month for the same amount of money they’d spend to buy a single newspaper. This is why, in my view, a huge step ahead was made when private and commercial FM radio stations began broadcasting across the entire continent in the mid-’90s, leading to a diversification of the information reaching common people.