Community of practice in action
25 May 2021 (Kuwait City): Since the BUILD Ideathon wrapped at the end of November 2020, our community of migrant workers and community leaders, CSOs and activists, students, architects, developers, designers and corporate allies, have continued to develop their relationships and expand on their collaborations. It’s been inspiring and heartwarming to see this community of practice come together on the basis of mutual respect and appreciation, grounded in the understanding of our shared responsibility. In particular, it’s been great seeing the progress made by the three projects selected for funding following the Ideathon. Over the past six months, all three teams have grown to incorporate other Ideathon participants as well as new connections, and have been working alongside each other, en.v and Grey Area Collective to further refine their concepts, develop their final project plans and continue to gather input from the communities most affected. The three projects, which have now moved forward to implementation, include:
eBuddy, a mobile application designed to help community caseworkers enter, track, assign, resolve, report and share complaints from distressed migrant workers. eBuddy was designed to address the needs of caseworkers by making their workflow easier and more efficient, facilitating networking and sharing resources with other groups, while providing security to the data shared on the system. The app will also be able to generate reports based on the collected data to inform future strategies, push for policy change and for research purposes.
Desert Days of the Forgotten, a community project aiming to shed light on the living conditions of migrants working as shepherds in Kuwait's desert by documenting the challenges they face and designing a dwelling prototype as a potential solution. The project includes extensive data collection, a migration mapping, and photography workshops for the shepherds leading to a final exhibition, where the team will also be presenting the design of their simple and cost-effective dwelling prototype. This will be developed in collaboration with local architects, volunteers and the shepherds themselves through earth building;
Baladkum, on online and offline community-building platform and information-sharing bulletin aiming to provide support and foster a sense of belonging amongst migrants of different nationalities and backgrounds living in Kuwait. Through crowd-sourced content and partnerships with various local migrant community organization, Baladkom is working to create a platform which will provide entertainment and skills-building opportunities to local migrant workers, as well as easy and multilingual access to emergency contacts and information about relevant laws, processes and procedures.
