Alison Lowndes talks to i-genius about the pressures involved in setting up AVIF, a ‘kitchen-table charity’ that organises volunteer work in rural Kenya. Her steely determination and passionate commitment towards the cause have driven AVIF from strength to strength. Here she talks about what she has achieved so far, and what she hopes to accomplish in the future…
Editor: What inspired you to set up AVIF?
Alison: A number of factors really. I was married back in 1992 in Mombasa (now just off the coast of Kenya). Many years later, I went to NE China in 2002 with my children and 65 international ESL teachers (English as a Second Language), recruited personally. I’d set up a huge summer school with a contact found on the internet, after work had led me into the opportunity. A few years later, again, I decided to run another summer school, but in Kenya, as I’d met more contacts there. Knowing the poverty I knew AVIF could only involve volunteer teachers but Kenya’s such a beautiful country that I realised people would be willing to spend their time and money helping us help the communities.
Editor: Can you explain more about the work of AVIF?
Alison: We organise volunteer programmes to small schools / communities and orphanages so we can highlight actual needs and initiate sustainable development projects. We help with all sorts of projects including introducing solar cooking, teaching basics about health & hygiene, malaria-prevention. This Summer we’re helping the Kenyan Ministry of Health with free dental clinics, distributing toothbrushes and toothpaste while the children & adults get a free check up. We also help the standard education of the children, pronunciation / spelling, etc. as all exams in Kenya are taken in English. If you can’t travel to Kenya, we can also offer online volunteering, helping with projects via the www.NABUUR.Com project management system, designed by the ex-CEO of the World Wildlife Fund (Netherlands) Siegfried Woldhek.
Working alongside the UK’s DEA (Development Education Association) we encourage teachers who join us to incorporate Development Education into their class schedules on their return, teaching all ages what the developing world’s really like, raising global awareness.
Editor: What are the main obstacles in setting up a charity such as AVIF? How do you hope to overcome these?
Alison: Governance is essential to fundraising. Transparency is easy, if you’re honest. We’re all over the internet, everyone knows who we are, where we are, what we do, but raising funds isn’t so easy if you have poor governance. I’ve made a fantastic contact, Liz Ward, who sits at home, currently Chennai, India, and assesses what AVIF needs to do to grow. She then emails me or we chat via www.Skype.com. Being a kitchen-table charity, the biggest challenge is doing everything myself. Its literally me sat at home in an armchair with a laptop and wireless broadband. Sharon Argwings Kodhek is my Managing Trustee in Nairobi, a Kenyan herself, she organises everything for the volunteers, runs through Orientation with them, is their Liaison and also Supervisor to all hosts involved. She’s incredible. Like me she does it all for nothing. AVIF cannot even cover expenses at this point of our infancy, but costs are very low. I dedicate, on average, 10 hours a day to AVIF, its fulfilling. What I’d like to be able to do is make AVIF self-sufficient, up to scratch with governance (accounts / procedures / reporting / management protocol) and then be able to go after larger funding to enable us to begin larger projects.
I have to say though that its quite refreshing to find out what you can actually achieve with little or no funds, thanks in part to the extreme generosity of our volunteers who fund themselves entirely.
Editor: Do you believe that the Millennium Development Goals can be achieved in Kenya?
Alison: I believe the government is realising now that with their every move on full display via the internet they have to change. More people are aware of the situations in Africa and where it isn’t life-threatening to travel, the second a citizen from a developed country makes contact with a Kenya, any corruption becomes apparent. we’ve seen this first-hand, and the Kenyan authorities aren’t slow to act anymore either .. the anti-corruption department can visit an orphanage within hours of receiving evidence of mismanaged funds for example. Couple this with a growing awareness in Kenya that foreign missionaries aren’t just going to turn up with armfuls of cash and computers anymore, and the strong, proud but poor Kenyans start to realise they can actually help themselves.
Editor: What are your hopes for the future of AVIF?
Alison: Self-sustaining and, not swamped in bureaucracy, achieving our aims, helping more and more to help themselves. If we get one child through education successfully, that’s a whole line of generations dragged out of poverty.
