My name is Winnie Nyangasi Musengo. I am from Kakamega county but I currently reside at Kawangware in Nairobi, Kenya. I came to learn about  SAYDS from my former church; I was privileged when our pastor chose me and six other young people  from the church to join the program in 2019.

After acquiring complexity thinking knowledge, I have learned that most problems that occur in society are complex, which has significantly improved my problem-solving skills. I now know that to identify the root cause of a problem, one has to identify the relevant interconnected and interacting components which lead to a problem’s emergence. Only by identifying the various causal factors and feedback loops, can one successfully tackle an issue.

I also learned the importance of looking at the key stakeholders in the systems the problems exist in,  their aims, mental models(how people understand the world) or how they perceive a situation. What stakeholders say about an issue matters because stakeholders usually have different perspectives which if not looked into usually narrow down to the emergence or the development of wrong interventions.

The knowledge that I gained has helped me and my team (Tumaini) to identify the relevant stakeholders that have an interest in our social problem of Lack of Quality Education. The main purpose of the team was to create networks using systems thinking knowledge learnt for easy sharing of skills and incorporate mentorship programs in our communities. We were able to prepare our Systemic Insights for Policy (SIP) documents and deliver them successfully. SIP documents are policy documents that aim at addressing social issues in a systematic way. The document is enriched with systematic approaches gathered from the training toolkits and community mobilisation conducted by the team.