The Project

Picha Mtaani is a youth-led national reconciliation initiative supported by the United Nations Development Programme, UNDP. Launching in Nairobi on 7 December, the Picha Mtaani initiative will seek to engage the Kenyan youth in finding lasting solutions to attaining peace and reconcilaition; to healing the Nation.

Through street exhibitions and audio visual presentations of events that rocked the country during the 2007/08 post election violence, Picha Mtaani will travel to six different towns around the country that bore brunt of the post election violence hosting conversations that will create a safe platform for individual reflection, honest dialogue, interpersonal healing and eventually community reconciliation.

Two years after the election violence that left 1,500 dead and hundreds of thousands internally displaced, Kenya is a nation in search of its identity. This identity crisis manifests itself in many different ways but most apparent being the crisis of the two publics; the national and the ethnic identities, well illustrated by the primacy of ethnic sympathies at the crunch moment of the election conflict.

The second crisis involves the majority of the nation’s demographic – the youth. Young people in the affected rural areas and the urban informal settlements have largely been portrayed as perpetrators of the violence, whereas they are also victims. Many of the combatants are themselves fodder in the conflicts. Either out of joblessness or through influence by their elders, young people are manipulated to put their lives on the line because they feel that the society cares very little for them and in return they have lost faith in society. They are therefore driven by hopelessness and despondency towards this uncaring society.

Thus the Picha Mtaani initiative aims at providing a platform for national reflection, building local reconstruction consensus through photo exhibitions, primarily for the youth and eventually spreading to entire societies. It also aims at organizing target communities to play their part in the wider national reconciliation and reconstruction process. This project aims at turning young people from un-involved individuals to committed stakeholder in this country, seeing that a large constituency of disinherited and excluded people is and will remain the greatest danger to the nation’s stability, harmony and peaceful co-existence.

We at Picha Mtaani believe that together we can forgive, make peace, heal and move forward. Together we can, Pamoja Tunaweza.

The images of the post election violence used for the street exhibitions were taken by the CNN Award winning photojournalist, Boniface Mwangi.