Moonbeam Youth Training Center, Kenya [Video Still]

The video still shows The Moonbeam Youth Training Centre in Mavoko, Nairobi. The Centre is a project of UN-HABITAT built with support from UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon and UN-HABITAT Executive Director Mrs. Anna Tibaijuk. The purpose of the center is to improve housing in urban slums by training young people in low cost, alternative construction technologies. Trainees gain employable skills, leadership skills, and self-help skills that help them transform informal housing to sustainable, permanent construction. Young people who complete the training receive certification and apprenticeships in carpentry, roofing, brick manufacture and bricklaying as well as other vocations.

With investment from local organizations and businesses, young men and women can significantly improve standards of living, including sanitation and security, for their communities while training for future employment. In addition to hands-on construction training, the program includes training in entrepreneurship and business management skills, with the objective that graduates can start and sustain viable enterprises that increase capacity in underserved communities, and enable future businesses to hire others. The project is an example of a multi-purpose, dynamic development initiative that involves youth as active rather than passive participants in achieving its goals. The trainees' work creates the project's own infrastructure, since the facility that the trainees are building actually serves as a training center when it is complete. The collaboration will eventually include youth from the informal settlements of Kibera, Mavoko, Githongoro and Thikain in Kenya.

Video: "A Ray of Hope for Youth Living in Slums," UN-Habitat, <a class="external" href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2YkeRxt5zmI">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2YkeRxt5zmI</a> and "Vocational Trainings Launched at the Moonbeam Youth Training Centre," Nairobi, November 30, 2009, <a class="external" href="http://www.unhabitat.org/content.asp?cid=7640&catid=531&typeid=6&subMenuId=0">http://www.unhabitat.org/content.asp?cid=7640&catid=531&typeid=6&subMenuId=0</a> (accessed March 5, 2009). Annotated by Susan Douglass.

Child with Purple Plastic Doll near Kumasi, Ghana [Photograph]

The girl in the photograph is from the Asante peoples in Ghana. She is holding a purple plastic baby doll of a type that is frequently found in markets in Ghana. The doll is both imported from Taiwan and made domestically in Ghana. The modern plastic doll is based on an older, traditional form of wooden figurine manufactured by village blacksmiths to represent the adult, female figure. Girls play with these dolls they call biiga ("child"), by caring for them, dressing and feeding them, and sometimes tucking them into the waistbands of their skirts just as women carry infants in cloth wrappers wrapped around their torsos. There are significant rituals associated with girls, including the belief that proper care for the doll can ensure fertility and survival of children. Girls also carry the dolls for display when they go among adults, and might expect a token present when, for example, they place their doll on the ground in front of a merchant in the market. Wealthier families and those in the towns have come to consider the plastic dolls to be more prestigious than the traditional wooden ones. Unlike the Mossi dolls, however, the plastic versions are shaped like a girl rather than a woman, and have generally Caucasian features and western dress.

Eliot Elisofon

"Child with Purple Plastic Doll near Kumasi, Ghana," Color Photograph by Eliot Elisofon, 1971, National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, Image number EEPA EECL 1015; Monochrome photograph from Roy, Christopher D. "Mossi Dolls." African Arts 14, no. 4 (August 1981): 47-88. Annotated by Susan Douglass.

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