My first Social Innovation project : Drums in the Dark

Drums in the Dark was born in Nairobi, Kenya as a part of a Post-Graduate Certificate Course in Social Innovation Management at the Amani Institute. It was there where I met Santiago Cortes and Rodrigo Alarcón and began working on systemic solutions to social issues. The three of us came all the way to Kenya, after working in different countries in the private, public and social sector, to deepen our knowledge and skills so that we could prepare to tackle global challenges in our society. With that ambitious goal in mind we began perceiving that the approach both individuals and society in good economic situations have towards the social sector is generally driven by pity, internal guilt and negative emotions. Commonly, donations and help happen out of those negative emotions, which at the end of the day create certain distance among the different segments of the society. We strongly disagree with that thought, and that sparked the initial philosophy to begin approaching specific problems.

In our initial research we found a more than worrying reality. In Kenya, there are virtually no life options for blind people after they finish high school. An individual who is born with a disability or who becomes disabled often faces social marginalisation and has significantly less chance of accessing health care, education, or employment leading to poverty. This poverty and entrenched social exclusion affects not only the individual, but also the family as a whole. Nowadays, less than 0,1% of the visual impaired population in Kenya -nearly 620 thousand inhabitants- has a full time job (Kenya Society for the Blind: 2013).

Without doubt, the most significant finding from this critical situation is that there are four major obstacles for blind people to effectively integrate into society:

1. (a)  Access to jobs and environments. An example is the high cost associated with hiring a blind person in comparison to a sighted one (it is estimated in average ten times more expensive);
2. (b)  Factors arising from the vision impairment itself. An example is the lack of employable skills amongst the blind population in Kenya (only 1% are able to read and write);
3. (c)  Discrimination that translates into a negative perception from society towards blind people (they are seen as hopeless and dependent);
4. (d)  Ignorance on part of society to the potential capabilities of blind/or vision-impaired persons that leads to the lack of enforcement of the Kenyan Disability Act by the local authorities.

The magnitude and complexity of these four barriers challenged us to think out-of-the box to define an alternative solution that would overcome these obstacles and create effective change.

Additionally, we came across the fact that due to their condition, blind people have enhanced capacities with their other senses. A number of human studies show that blind persons perform nonvisually tasks better than those with sight. In the absence of vision, blind people pay attention to auditory cues and learn how to use them more efficiently. The brain adapts to the loss by giving itself a makeover. If one sense is lost, the areas of the brain normally devoted to handling that sensory information do not go unused – they are rewired and put to work processing other senses. This is called neuroplasticity, the ability of our brains to change with experience. A large body of evidence shows when the brain is deprived of input in one sensory modality, it is capable of reorganising itself to support and augment other senses, a phenomenon known as “cross-modal neuroplasticity” (Loss of Sight and Enhanced Hearing: A Neural Picture PLoS Biol. Feb 2005; 3(2): e48).