My Experience in Global Citizen Course
2014
Moving away from my home country Uganda to
Kenya ready to attend a Global Citizen Course (GCC), with a lot of expectations
and anxiety because i considered my self very lucky for being one of the two
people that were selected from Action Aid Uganda to represent the country in
the training that runs for four(4) months or 16 weeks in all the
platforms of the two countries of Kenya and Tanzania.
A word of thanks and appreciation to
Action Aid Uganda for all the support particularly financial and efforts
rendered towards making it possible for me to attend the Global Citizen Course
2014. A promise that I will always in return share with many youth as I can to
cause a change out of the gained knowledge.
Global Citizen Course Participants 2014
For this year's
training participants came from five countries that is to say Denmark, South
Africa, Kenya, Tanzania and of course Uganda. A total of 21 participants form
one big family the "GCC
SPRING 2014".
For an individual to become a citizen you
will have to be legally recognized as a member of a state, with rights and
obligations, this questions the logic and practicality behind the concept of
Global Cirtizen. we are born in different states and we need to obtain national
documents to be legally recognized, as for global citizen an individual does
not need to obtain any documents or follow any legal regulation. Everyone is
born as a global citizen but it depend with the ability for an individual to
realize that he/ she is a global citizen.
Global citizen is not all about proper
document but proper minds that can realize the importance of human race finding
a common ground to help each other. There is no person who can legalise that an
individual is a global citizen but acts and the ability to tolerate different
cultures, nationalities and race. The strength to not see and concentrate on
any differences but on our similarities that brings us together is one of the credentials
of being a global citizen.
Global Citizens do not believe in racial
division but make efforts for people to see each other beyond skin colour, they
do not see other people's cultures as being wierd but celebrate them as they
are and input where there is need, they do not look where the concept of human
rights come from but measure the practicality and the importance of human
rights and finaly they are enemies of povety and iniquality but advocates of
peace and equality.
With a number of Mandatory activities that take place
at the platform ranging from morning fellowship, morning sports,sessions,
community work, workshops, excursions and others that are meant to expose
participants to a lot of activities that occur around the globe.
Key learning from Global Citizen Course
During the course I have conducted a lot of interviews
where I get most of the ideas for sharing and comparing with what happens in my
country particularly to the youth in Busiki and Uganda as a whole and try to
get a link with action aid approach to social problems.
Below is short
interview that I conducted in Nairobi Kenya in a slum called Kibera with a
small scale vegetable business woman asking her about the challenges
she finds in operating her small scale business.
Me together with other GCC participants, we
visited Elizabeth who finds it competitive to run her own business in Kibera.
She faces the challenge of earning enough money to pay her rent and send her
children to school. She moved to Kibera in 1998 together with her husband and
children because it was closer to school and her husband’s job. After some
years living as a housewife, she found it difficult that her husband didn’t
have a permanent monthly salary so she decided to open her own vegetable “Kiosk”
or shop. In 2004 Elizabeth went to the local market with only 300 KSH in her
hands and bought: sukuma wiki to resell it in her local area. That was how she
started her life as a businesswoman. Over the years her shop developed and she
started to have a bigger assortment. She started to save up for her dream of
expanding her own kiosk, which meant that they had a lack of diversified food.
In December 2013 her dream came true and she opened up her own kiosk just
beside her house in Kibera. There a 1 million people living in Kibera and the
conditions are extremely poor, and most of its residents lack access to basic
services, including electricity and running water. Everyone has to make a
living and earn money for rent and school and many has their own business just
like Elizabeth, which means that the competition is very high. She collaborates
with the competition by advertising her shop through her regular customers and
making good deals. Her main focus point is her costumers so she offers good
customer care and is always willing to help and negotiate. The biggest
challenge of this competition is that there is no permanent monthly salary,
which means that sometimes she can’t afford to pay her rent and her children’s
school fees. Elizabeth has got 4 biological children and 4 orphans that she is
taking care of, and that also means that sometimes it’s too expensive to afford
medical help. She is dreaming about extending her shop to a bigger one with a
variety of assortments, so she could get a bigger monthly income and secure her children’s future.
I learnt a lot from this interview and this is
one gospel of change that i can encourage my fellow youth in my country and
Busiki to always think in the same line. Such a bigger dream is what i can
share with many youths who are living in poverty because they have no jobs yet
they can create their own jobs by starting up small scale business ventures as
they wait for formal employment.
This training has impacted a lot of knowledge in
life due to different exposures that i have gone through most especially
different action aid projects and approaches to youth issues; it makes me feel
that “I am a complete global citizen”. And action aid are on high gear of
meeting the change promise 6 which says “by 2017,over 500 million youth will be
mobilised to take action towards building a poverty free planet”.
