world view - Al Kags — Strategist, Social Entrepreneur, Writer

August 23, 2021

Thinking about Hewlett Foundation’s Strategy and Decolonising Philanthropy

In this blogpost, I decided to be a bit presumptive - to pronounce myself on the idea of decolonising development (and by extension, philanthropy) and to make comments on Hewlett Foundation's Transparency Participation and Accountability Strategy for the coming five years. First, A Short story "What do ...

August 11, 2021

A teenager’s pregnancy changed the destinies of two people forever.

Here's the story of how Benjamin Katana dropped out of school to become a breadwinner https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rc9w9dPUlPk Benjamin tells the story of how he became a breadwinner When I started telling you the stories of Kenyans who don't exist despite the fact that you see them every day as ...

June 24, 2021

These are ways to make people count

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote here about Mama Furaha, a woman that I met that does not officially exist and how many people don't count. I have so many more stories of real people and I will be telling you about them. One ...

June 22, 2021

KBC’s Problem is not it’s logo

Maybe now it is, a little bit... Kenya's national TV broadcaster, Kenya Broadcasting Corporation (KBC) Television has rebranded for the second time in two decades. The new look station now features veteran anchor, Catherine Kasavuli, who was the Belle of TV as I was growing up ...

April 1, 2021

Beyond the top 1% of Kenyans and the employed, there are Kenyans who don’t exist.

A couple of weeks ago, there was an article in the Business Daily that has costed me many nights of sleep and much consternation. That report has been a major distraction in my mind these past couple of weeks that I almost have been ...

March 15, 2021

What Gen Z want us to know about them

I have the good fortune of having lived four decades and with the age, I accumulated the experiences to give me the benefit of hindsight and some nuggets of foresight. I would not imply that these (the hindsight and foresight) come automatically as a factor ...

January 29, 2021

Working from home: how professional growth could be stunted

In my last blog post, I intimated that our organisation, The Open Institute, has resolved to close our offices and for all of our staff to work from home. Based on this, I talked about my considering to move to shags (back to the village ...

January 9, 2021

What if I moved to the village?

2021 is promising to be a year of some fundamental changes for me. It started with our organisation implementing a decision for our team to permanently work from home, as a means for us to stay safe, but also for our programming to start to ...

June 26, 2020

Proposed law could take us back to the dark days

I was alarmed to read an article in this newspaper on Wednesday that said Interior Cabinet Secretary Fred Matiang’i may soon access mobile phone data from any individual suspected of spying for a foreign power without a court warrant as the State switches gear in ...

June 20, 2020

Time to Re-imagine the police

The murder of George Floyd, an African American man by American police has put the global focus on the police and their role in societies. Mr Floyd was killed by a white US police officer who knelt on his neck for almost nine minutes. Now ...

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