 This is the way to do it. This is the way to do it. This is the way to do it. This is the way to do it. Hello and welcome to Youth in Action. Today we have Raymond Odiambo, a Jack of All Traits. I can't even begin introducing him. So Raymond, can you tell us about yourself? My name is Raymond Odiambo, resident of Kisumu. I am a person, a father and an artist. So I reside at Dunga and I'm here as the founder of Up at Kisumu. This is a group of young people who are innovative, who are coming up with different creative things to suit the economy. So what we do here is to physically harvest water hyacinth from the lake and other waste products. We have plastics, we have used clothes, we have katayas that finds their ways to the lake, maybe through floods. Kisumu is known for flooding. Let me say West Kenya's region is known for flooding. So anything can find its way to the lake. So we collect these waste together and other waste products we sort them together and create meaningful things out of them. In various circumstances we've been helping people communicating to actually remove the weeds out of the lake but how do we make sure that we make use of them or they don't go back to the lake. So that is where Uffats come in and complete the cycle of completely working on the things that have been removed from the lake and creating meaningful out of it. So far we are having a group of both young female and male that is supporting this Uffats project and we have done a lot of things since 2016 together and we are hopefully moving towards a higher level of creating employment to young people. So what kind of things do you make out of this waste product? So we make tables, we make flower vases out of it, we make seeds, designer seeds, not just normal seeds but we think and create something that would really suit the market, that would really be appealing to those who want to buy and even to ourselves. We are also the consumers of such things. We are making wall mirrors, we are making coffee tables, we are making a lot of things. I will not mention all of them today. Nice. So what inspired you to do this? Actually the environment that I live in, I live in Dunga next to Lake Victoria. We love Lake Victoria so much and people come from all over the world to come and observe how Lake Victoria is beautiful but what amazed us is the level of dumping in Lake Victoria. So I used to have inspiration about how we can manage waste products and I have a passion for it. So we started seeing how Lake Victoria is becoming a hazard to even the aquatic lives and even to the fish that we are feeding on. That's why we came back with a motto Bring Back Lake Victoria to suit the support of cleaning Lake Victoria. So that is our main drive but I know the more we are doing for Lake Victoria we have noticed slum areas and now we are coming up with a general conservation of environment. You must have started somewhere right? When did you start this? We started back in 2016 but at that level we were a little bit low. I mean we started low production we started with the flower basis so we started with a small shop just making flower basis and people were wondering what we were doing with old clothes and cement and we kept on training some few young people that came by that time now that I had the skill as the founder so I started engaging young people how to make flower basis and now reserve the soil because we've used the soil so much until nowadays we are left with just a portion so we were encouraging people not to use soil to make pots we can equally have the beauty of other pots but we make use of old clothes than using soil to make pots so we started small and then we grew to 2021 is when we started commercial business where we are in Milimani we used to have a small shop besides the road in Dunga where we used to do street business what I mean here by street business is that people come and buy from you they do not know the value of what they are carrying away they do not know how they are made so when we came to commercial business we got support from Inam Capital who now assisted us in having a space in Milimani as our showroom and also working space so this is something that really encouraged us to continue working more so as for now I can say that the UFATS is now stronger from this year, January where we got the space to do commercial business in your journey how has the community received at first because it was a nightmare to them people are wondering what I was doing with the old clothes what I was doing with the higher seam so some of them even are thinking that we were just young people that are creating attention but actually we had a vision for this and we had a plan that one day it will materialize to become something that is acceptable something that people will sit down and discuss something that if mentioned people will it will keep people awake so when we started small we used to make flower vases and we tell people to now use the flower vases that are made from recycling and leave the pots for soil conservation others will still go for the other ones for soil but when we aligned the benefits now people started reverting to flower pots that are made through our creativity reason being even their stability their style, the uniqueness and even the issue of conserving the environment made them so appealing until now people have adopted them instead of the other pots that are wasting them I mean uses a lot of soil and wasting our environment so how do you balance your work as being in the Red Cross with this one being in Red Cross I must say that it has been a long journey I have been in Red Cross for the last 8-9 years as a student from school now I joined to support the society Red Cross is a home for volunteers it's a voluntary work until one day you decide no I don't want to give my service to Red Cross but once you taste the importance of supporting the community you'll never quit something that when you start that there is no quitting so as a volunteer in Red Cross I believe that even if I do other jobs I can still volunteer with the resources that I've collected to support young people because even in Red Cross I'm the sole donor of Red Cross as a community UNI the person who is supporting the other community that are vulnerable so through the collection of of what we have we can put them together and support the society so it's never a job that somebody is going to say that I'm going to work for Red Cross so I have to look for a way that I can also get my own resources and also support Red Cross society so going the other side to do the community work also creates a very big importance in my life because I learn how community behave vulnerability that are maybe within the community so those are some of the stabilizers in my business that enable me to reach the community easily and access the raw materials that I want also invite them to come and work for something that can put food on their table where do you source your material generally for now we have appeal drives for materials especially for kataes they are all over in the city and people do not know what to do with them so we had appeal poster for people to dump in their material at we launch where we are situated in Milimani so people have been responding positively in the olden days we used to to buy and it was quite expensive for us because we are just a starter so it used to be very difficult for us to even get a number of tyres to work on a seat so I must say that people have responded and people are bringing kataes motorcycle tyres and even kids nowadays identify our group with the kataes when they see they just bring the tyres you can pick this one so we are moving to a greater height of people now starting accepting that they need to bring their dumps here so where do you get your clientele and what is your market our clients majorly are schools because once we get the tyres they might be too much for at work alone so we go and create meaningful playgrounds for kids in school those ones we just do to support the schools we have done 3 schools for now just creating playgrounds where they can now hang out with the tyres around with the painted tyres with different texture, colours another big market for us is pubs majorly pubs freely like things that are unique that would attract customers we have hotels we have recreational centers we have malls like basin mall we have a great support from them they have been buying from us and even other places and even individuals part of our targets and in terms of support have you have any philanthropists approached you and want to support your work yes of course we've received I can say our first I opening support that we've received maybe not in terms of monetary value but in terms of I can say in terms of space support we got a communication from Winnam Capital Winnam Capital is just a business venture that incubates young SMEs to grow their business and they also provide expertise on how to carry out your business so when they got us from the street doing street business we talked we had a long conversation with them and they convinced me that they can provide me a space I was so reluctant because it's not very easy to find such people that wants to encourage you wants to expand you and 1, 2, 3 so we had a long conversation with them and they agreed to bring me in milimani where I am now and give me space and give me a little bit of technical expertise to support my business so now I moved from street business to commercial business where I can meet investors I can go there and look for customers and have even physical address because the other shop look like a briefcase office no one would want to come and spend in that office but here we can have a conversation on how we can improve our business we can have even more employees coming over because there is a space and what challenges have you encountered doing this work? I know when Raba meets the road there must be tired bus there must be other issues that comes I can say that for the first time the big heat this year is COVID-19 actually COVID-19 just brought us to the rock bottom but we are trying to come up with the different mechanisms of surviving we have created so many artwork that are loveable people love them but there was no money to buy them people opted for basic things that can make them survive other than once we consider this as once because some of the people were saying that they would rather buy food than buying luxuries so the other problem that we have is finances for example now we are just depending on ourselves the UFAR groups we are just coming up and contributing towards the support of our business supporting us for now we also plow back every profit that we have made from the business we just try to use a little of it and make sure that we plow back so that we have more creation of other things so it's never been easy but we know at the end we'll see the light and how do you plan to sustain your business in the long run? we have different mechanisms now that our business is gender inclusive we want our people to reach a certain level where they are self independent and we always teach them on how they can also start their own business not only depending on the group that is already existing so we have a plan that in future the group that we are hosting now can be able to teach other people so that we expand the UFARs not just in Kisumu we can have UFARs in Mombasa Nairobi and even abroad where we can now have open market to sell outside and even to appreciate the investors who will join us in Kenya the other thing we want to teach people that is our future objective we want to teach people how to professionally manage waste like in Kenya for now we have one bin at the center and everything that is a waste is put in one bin and it's collected and dumped in the same place so we want to come up with different mechanisms on how we can handle waste if it's a bin for metals we have to put it in metal with a bin for plastics and then general waste that can be compost it's okay to decompose them at the right place so we have a vision as UFARs to come up with something like an app that will be having people in different estates and we monitor them every day and we go and collect those that they have dumped in the right places and also appreciate them with a token and now we can have partnership with different companies because I know we cannot consume everything everything that they contribute in those dumps might be helpful in some organization in some companies so we can negotiate with them so that they also buy the idea of collecting waste from the bins that they can use so another one we are also empowering young girls for example if you look at lake region there are issues that arose in terms of young women exchanging sex with fish we are talking about unemployed young women we can't become so much vulnerable so UFARs give them an opportunity to come and work actually come and work for food because if you look at the percentage of groups that we have now some of them were not able to put food on the table I'm not just talking about food you can buy bread and milk and put it there I'm talking about good food well balanced diet so we are encouraging them to do meaningful things to create wealth in an accepted way so that we reduce cases of HIV along the lake and also we encourage young people to be empowered so in terms of skill development we have a vision with our team we are training people according to their skill capacity in areas that they are interested in you can't be interested in arts but the capacity at which you can grow in arts may not allow you but you are interested in something else that you can do so we also empower them to do what they feel it's right for them an Englishman puts it in this way liking what you do is freedom but doing what you like is happiness so they will choose happiness at times of freedom because of what they want to do we encourage everybody that is willing to support even those young girls or young people that are working from here to do so because this is the right time for them what about for example five years to come what do you aim to achieve then we want to have a policy as a group and I know if the county and the national government adopts it a policy that will allow even arts I know CBC is coming in but we are talking about some policies that will support the formal employment so that they get good funds so that they grow their business because if you look at now the employment rate the government can only support but a few people but what about the group of people that are left in the informal sectors of course we appreciate that we need to go to school but the importance of going to school is to have skills so we cannot always look at the government offices looking for jobs while we have the skills to expand on our own so that's why we are coming up with some policies that will support informal sectors to grow and also to be respected because when people feel about this work they look at it as a dirty work and of course it's not dirty as I think money is never dirty but when you get money out of something it's always clean so you're also thinking about developing skill young girls and boys at their youth age so that they come out sprouting with different types of skills from arts and even other areas that they would feel comfortable with them sure and in this slide what is your call to the young people time takes each and every time everything has a season as a young person and you are seated at home looking at your papers thinking about employment I know it might not be the right time for you to be employed but I'm just telling that young people that are there who has finished university who has skills please come out and share your skills this is the right time there is no other time that you will be waiting for just fold your sleeves do not choose job now because whatever we have will deal with whatever we have not whatever we wish we would have so come out and support any other business that you feel can support you go to work because employment is also never promising you can have employment but tomorrow there is no funds you send home so go to work but open a shop somewhere have a business that brings income get employed but think about business that will run you throughout the life because it's never enough also you can't be earning well but it's never enough so you must have side hustle but to us who are in an employment sector I mean a informal sector we treat this as our first and our best employment yes so we really encourage them to work and continue working hey I am already recruited doing what you like is freedom and liking what you do is happiness what do you have that out there what is your skill what do you love go do it and start immediately to manage your happiness this has been youth in action this is the way to do it