Pamoja Trust

about

What we do

Our mission

Pamoja Trust is a non-profit making organization dedicated to promoting access to land, shelter and basic services for the marginalized communities in the urban, peri-urban and rural areas. 

Pamoja Trust envisions an equitable and democratic society where urban citizens have adequate space. We exist to facilitate and advocate for processes and approaches aimed at strengthening people’s organization formations to ensure human dignity for all, particularly the marginalized groups.

Our theory of change

Pamoja Trust believes that the recognition of community based and community led innovations can contribute to the development of inclusive societies that are   not vulnerable and fragile to development shocks and pandemics. To achieve this, the communities must be able to possess the requisite capacity and methods to negotiate their citizenship with the political class. This is to be anchored within the invited spaces within the Constitution of Kenya and through various statutes.

Pamoja Trust advances different models that assert the place of community innovations in advancing inclusive urban development. These models document issues and community agenda, organize communities around these issues and guide policy conversations in this way informing policy formulation and implementation.  These models include the adaptive planning model, the primary cooperative housing model, the delegated management model and the alternative justice systems model.

Our work

Pamoja Trust strongly collaborates with Muungano wa Wanavijiji (Federation of Slum Dwellers) and other Social Movements representing people’s settlements from across Kenya. Our work is nested within community structures through a mode of co-production where we deliberately endeavor to co-produce evidence with those who find themselves in the situation of marginalization.

Key among these structures is the community leadership that play essential and critical roles in all the processes that Pamoja Trust undertakes. Our key method of documentation is through enumerations and mapping which is a community centered process that translates the vision and priorities of peoples’ settlements into outputs that they can use as practical tools of negotiating their inclusion into county and national level development agenda. Our enumeration processes provide a seamless process in which communities are organized around their own issues, with their own data.