Joy Portella's blog

Adam Stelle of Startup Weekend, former Googler Gisel Kordestani, and Andy Dwonch and Andrea Koppel of Mercy Corps discuss tech entrepreneurship in the West Bank and Gaza at an event in Seattle last week. Photo: Mercy Corps

Last week, Seattle’s South Lake Union neighborhood was abuzz with a rare combination of techies, social investors, Arab world watchers and humanitarians. This eclectic group was brought together to learn about a unique program called the Arab Developer Network Initiative (ADNI). Formed by Mercy Corps, Google.org and the Source of Hope Foundation, ADNI boosts the efforts of young people in the Palestinian Territories to become technology entrepreneurs.

Unlike the typical Mercy Corps event, this panel of speakers from Mercy Corps, Google.org and Startup Weekend didn’t mention giving away food, water, shelter or other kinds of assistance. Instead, they talked about fostering a culture of entrepreneurship, and in some cases, doing what’s often considered taboo in the aid world: encouraging failure.

“We’re not giving people fish, or even teaching them to fish. We’re saying: Go fish! Entrepreneurs will learn from failing,” explained Adam Stelle, COO and facilitator of Seattle-based Startup Weekend, which runs 54-hour events around the world, bringing together techies of all stripes to share ideas and launch startup companies. They’ve already run one Startup Weekend in the Gaza Strip – the winner plans to establish a mobile-based service to remind ailing patients to take their meds – and there will be more in the coming months.

For young techies in Gaza who are hungry for economic opportunities, the experts who visited from Google are their heroes; they’re who these young people want to become. Google is also hungry for opportunities — there’s a global gap of Arab-language content and applications that young, enterprising techies in the Palestinian Territories can start to fill.

So what’s a global humanitarian agency like Mercy Corps doing in this mix? In a place as isolated as Gaza, Mercy Corps provides the critical local connections, know-how, and startup capital that other investors are too risk averse to offer. Through ADNI, Mercy Corps isn’t providing non-profit solutions; we’re facilitating for-profit ones.

As Mercy Corps’ Senior Director of Social Innovations Andy Dwonch explained, the complicated politics of Gaza mean that the only economic opportunities are virtual, and a tech-savvy youth population is well positioned to jump on these. Dwonch asserted that the end game of Mercy Corps’ work in Gaza isn’t a successful aid program. Instead, “The big win of Mercy Corps’ work in Gaza is new companies and whole lot of jobs.”

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Things are not getting better in the Horn of Africa. In the nearly three months since I visited the region, the landscape has gotten drier, and people and animals have become more desperate for water and food. The forecast for fall rains is mixed at best, and even if the rains come in full force, the drought is so severe that they won’t provide lasting relief.

The drought and famine have slipped from the news headlines. It’s difficult for the media to stay focused on an emergency that’s characterized by a predictable slow squeeze rather than a single, surprising jolt. As public attention has waned, donations have fallen far short of what’s needed.

This lack of attention and donations makes it all the more important for large donors with strategic vision to fill in the gaps. I was happy to recently learn that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has awarded Mercy Corps a $2.5 million grant for our emergency and recovery work in northeast Kenya, where devastating drought has been largely overshadowed by famine and conflict in its neighbor Somalia.

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A traditional herder stands on the withered landscape outside the drought-stricken town of Hadado, Kenya. Photo: Joy Portella/Mercy Corps

I returned from the drought-stricken Horn of Africa just over two weeks ago, and am amazed by the progress our team has made in such a short period of time. But there is an enormous amount of work to be done in the coming months as millions of families struggle to survive the long, dry summer and early fall.

Today I had the opportunity to talk with our Africa Director Matthew Lovick, who’s traveling with our team in Wajir County, one of the areas I recently visited. He and our team spent yesterday traveling to seven of the eight villages where we’re working in western Wajir.

A seasoned aid worker, Lovick declared that he’d “never seen anything like it,” referring to the incredibly arid land and desperation of people and animals.

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Zeynab Hassan lives in the bone-dry town of Hadado with her five children. Her husband has been gone for one month and counting. Photo: Joy Portella/Mercy Corps

One of the saddest things about the current drought in the Horn of Africa is that it’s destroying families. Men go off with livestock to find water — often traveling hundreds of miles for months at a time — or they drop out of pastoral life and flow into towns to look for odd jobs. Either way, women and children are often left behind.

This week in the town of Hadado, I met one of the women I’ll call a “drought widow.” Zeynab Hassan is a middle-aged mother of five children who range in age from seven to 20 years old. Zeynab is relatively new to Hadado. She and her sister’s family moved here from what used to be nearby grasslands when both of their husbands left. The men are now wandering with their remaining animals to search for water and food.

That was one month ago. I asked Zeynab when her husband will return and she only shrugged, saying, “I have no idea.”

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Hindiya Roble, 10, and her family have been walking for 17 days in search of water. Photo: Joy Portella/Mercy Corps

Hadado is dry as a bone. The landscape changes dramatically as you approach this small town in the western part of Kenya’s Wajir county. I thought the landscape around Wajir town was bleak — dusty and dotted with dried bushes and only an occasional sprig of green life. But in and around Hadado, it’s a moonscape. There is nothing alive for as far as the eye can see.

Until we saw Hindiya and her goats.

Hindiya is 10 years old, and she’s beautiful and smiling. She’s traveling with her father Roble, and her brother and sister, as well as an extended clan of herder friends and family. And of course, they have their goats in tow.

We pass around bottles of water to Hindiya and her family, not as a bribe for them to talk to us, but because they’re obviously thirsty. I’ve never been on a Mercy Corps trip where we’ve just given water and food to people as we pass. It’s usually a bad practice — an easy way to start a riot of thirsty, desperate people. But out here, there aren’t many people, and when you come across a solitary herder, you know that he or she has been walking for hours — if not days — with no sustenance. Human instinct compels you to offer water, the most precious commodity around.

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Adan Qala Dido, the richest man in Elwak, tells me how he's fallen on tough times. Photo: Joy Portella/Mercy Corps

Today the Mercy Corps team visited Elwak, a small town in the northeast corner of Kenya that lies only about eight kilometers from Somalia. I’ve spent a lot of time talking to the poorest of the poor about how their lives are impacted by the drought that’s plaguing this region. Today I discovered how it’s impacting even the richest.

Adan Qala Dido, age 62, is a rarity in places like Elwak. He has money, a lot of it. He owns three stores in town where he sells clothes, food and household items. He’s also a wholesale seller and trader. Without prompting or pretense, Adan describes himself as “the richest man in town.”

But these are tough times for everyone, even someone as well off as Adan. A combination of factors has conspired to make his life significantly harder. People in this area used to buy staples like sugar that were imported cheaply from nearby Somalia. But a closed border for the past two years exacerbated by conflict means that these goods can no longer come through Somalia, and have to be obtained from Nairobi, where prices are much higher. Add soaring national rates of inflation to the mix — as well as a global increase in food prices —and you’ve got the perfect storm of high-priced items.

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One of many dead cows at today's Garissa Livestock Market. Photo: Joy Portella/Mercy Corps

I’m a big fan of visiting markets, especially during Mercy Corps trips. It seems that even in the bleakest parts of the world, markets are vibrant, dynamic and often colourful places.

That wasn’t quite the scene when I visited the Garissa Municipal Livestock Market this morning. This market is huge; it’s a regional hub with buyers and sellers coming from the Kenyan cities of Garissa, Wajir and Mandera, and even neighboring Somalia. The market happens every Wednesday, and usually involves 4,000-5,000 cows.

All of this should lead to market vibrancy, but not when most of the animals are weak, skinny, dead or dying. Sadly, that’s what I observed at the Garissa market today.

One quick note before I go on: Mercy Corps focuses on helping people, not animals. But in this part of the world, the two are tightly connected. Most people here are pastoralists, meaning that they herd and sell animals for a living — and livestock like goats, cows and camels are all they have in the world. When the welfare of animals takes a dramatic turn for the worse, so does the welfare of humans.

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Nimu Adan and her baby granddaughter in drought-stricken Garissa, Kenya. Their family herds goats, and many of them are sick and starving. Photo: Joy Portella/Mercy Corps

I arrived in Garissa, Kenya — a city of at least 180,000 people not far from the border with Somalia — today after a long, hot drive from Nairobi. I’ll be in Garissa and areas to the north for the remainder of the week to see how this year’s drought has impacted families in the area.

From an outside perspective, it’s easy to hear about drought in the Horn of Africa and glaze over. It’s one of those creeping natural disasters that people in the West hear about almost every year.

But this isn’t just another annual drought – this is the worst crisis the region has seen in 60 years. To put that in historical perspective, the situation is looking more grim than the massive drought in Ethiopia in the mid-1980s that prompted the Live Aid concert, and the drought in Somalia in early 1990s that led to the well-known United Nations peacekeeping mission.

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Congregants at the All Saints Cathedral were jubilant celebrating the first Sunday after independence. Photo: Joy Portella/Mercy Corps

Last week in South Sudan, I was able to witness the birth of the world’s newest nation. I also got to talk to numerous South Sudanese — many older and far wiser than myself — about excitement and concerns for their country. I’d like to recount a couple of those experiences.

First, I had a remarkable meeting with the Paramount Chief of the Boma district of Juba, South Sudan’s capital city. He is a retired policeman and one of Juba’s 31 “chiefs,” a function that is somewhere between that of a government representative and a traditional elder. The Chief is a tall, gentle, gregarious guy who was elected 17 years ago, and has been working ever since to resolve disputes over everything from cows to water, build schools, promote agriculture and generally help his people make progress.

I asked the Chief what most excites him about independence. He explained that for too long the people of the South were oppressed. They suffered through violence, displacement and slavery, and even something as seemingly simple as moving around a city or outside of one’s village was often impossible because of a complex and oppressive system of checkpoints.

“Ever since I was born, all I’ve known is war," he said. "Now my people have a chance to be happy with peace.”

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A young man looks out over South Sudan's independence celebration. Photo: Joy Portella/Mercy Corps

The road to independence for South Sudan has been long and difficult. The road to the official Independence Day celebration was also pretty tough.

I was eager to attend the independence ceremony. To get a seat I needed to have an invitation from Government of South Sudan — hurdle number one. Through persistent work, we secured several such invites.

Shortly after arriving in Juba, I discovered that invites alone were not sufficient. I also had to get a VIP pass, which required the presentation of a very unofficial-looking scrap of paper with my name and a government ministry stamp — hurdle number two. With scrap of paper in hand, I waited on line for several hours to have my photo taken — hurdle three. Then I received a very official looking VIP guest pass. Mission accomplished.

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