Making of The Global Citizens Festival

By Rakeli Gichuki

ActionAid’s Global Platform Nanyuki is currently abuzz with activity, the task in hand being preparations for the global citizens festival to take place in Nanyuki town right outside Nakumatt Supermarket. The idea of having a festival came about from previous global citizen course participants and current facilitators. The previous global citizens course participant thought that it would be important to have an activity that is captures the underlying philosophy of the course, while the facilitators thought would be important to celebrate global citizenship with a festival. Thus, the festival embodies ideals from both parties since it is a celebration of global citizenship. Furthermore, festival presented an ideal way for the global Platform Nanyuki to have its presence felt in Nanyuki town. 
Moreover, Nanyuki is a town that hosts foreigners from different parts of the world, from British, Italians, American et cetera, all with different agendas. The festival then is an ideal way of raising the consciousness of the people of Nanyuki on global citizenship a fact they live with every day. In addition to the above, the festival is also a way of appreciating the people of Nanyuki for being host not only to the global platform Nanyuki and but also to the myriad of foreigners living in the town.

The preparations for the festival entailed a number of things. The first step was a brainstorming session started three weeks ago in Dar-es-Salaam using the concept of Future Workshop. Secondly, when in Kenya, the participants had to figure out what the theme of the festival would be, and this was easy seeing that our predecessors had thought about it, we agreed unanimously to have the theme of the festival be a celebration of global citizenship. Thirdly, we had to come up with the message that we would want to share with the world. Since we are a diverse group from different parts of the world, we all had different messages that matched with the theme. We therefore decided that we would all want a chance to share our individual messages. Christine’s, a facilitator in the GCC, 

Christine holding up her message

message is Solidarity. For her, solidarity is all about building relevant alliances that foster the movement of social change.

Abdul-Hanan

Abdul-Hanan holding up his message

 a global citizen course participant, message is Umoja. Umoja is a Swahili word that means unity and for him Unity across geographical borders is essential if the notion of global citizenship is to thrive.
Next, we had to come up with various country presentations for our various countries to present during the festival. For the Kenyan’s the presentation is about our independence. It features the union jack flag giving way for to the Kenyan flag after we won independence. The Ghanaian’s participants presented a historical timeline of the major events leading up to independence. 

The Danes presentation featured prominent persons in their country as well as interesting facts they thought people should know. The Zimbabwean also gave a brief historical background of their country as well as popular tourist attraction sites. The Tanzanians talked about two most important natural features of their country, which is the Ngorongoro Crater and Mt. Kilimanjaro.  

A lot of effort went into ensuring that the festival come to life. It took us roughly three days to put everything together and by Friday evening, everything was in place, simply waiting for the big day.