Seeding Change — The Story of Lwala
Penned under the intent to make room for the proximal voices leading important systems change and social justice efforts around the world, we are delighted to add our voices to the cacophony of actors who have been enabled to empower others through this most recent round of grants from MacKenzie Scott’s philanthropy.
We are Milton and Fred Ochieng’ — the “Sons of Lwala” — and our story is like that of so many who are striving to make their communities more just, equitable, and healthy places for all to thrive. We grew up without electricity and running water in the tiny village of Lwala in Migori, Kenya. Our parents, both teachers, sacrificed a lot to send us to good schools. Fred and I later got admitted to Dartmouth College in the USA, but our parents could not afford the $900 to buy Milton the plane ticket. That is when the village of Lwala came together and sold their chickens, cows, goats, and sheep to buy the ticket to send their sons to the USA to become medical doctors. Their only request: “Don’t forget us!” And we have not forgotten the wonderful people of Lwala who invested in the dreams of their children.
Fred and I have spent the last seventeen years working with our community in Kenya who donated land and resources to build a hospital in memory of our parents, who tragically died from HIV-AIDS in 2004 and 2005. After attending Dartmouth College and medical school at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine on full academic scholarship, we returned home to work side-by-side with the community to form what is today Lwala Community Alliance, an organization serving over 100,000 people with access to quality primary health care. Lwala believes that communities have untapped potential to solve the world’s most pressing challenges. We build coalitions of communities, frontline health workers, civil society, and government to advance high-quality health for all. This bottom-up change promises holistic solutions that are custom-built for the systems they are meant to reform.
This work started in our personal tragedy, but it ends in hope. We know that community-led health generates impact. Since we started our work in Lwala we have seen a 64% reduction in child deaths, a 73% reduction in infant deaths, a 300% increase in contraceptive use, and 98% childhood immunization rates. In our continued fight against the scourge of HIV/AIDS, 98% of HIV-exposed infants supported by Lwala during pregnancy tested negative 18 months after birth. We are bringing up a new generation free of mother-to-child transmission of HIV.
We have seeded change in Lwala and we aren’t finished yet. We have dreams to see this work scale to impact each of the 1.1 million people living throughout Migori County and ultimately to 45 million people in Kenya. We believe in local leadership and our local leadership believes in change. We are wrestling with many of the same challenges that MacKenzie Scott and her team named: power in the hands of too few, decolonizing development, and enabling communities to sustain impact. As an organization, we are taking small but important steps to ensure we are doing our part to make systems just and whole. Our Co-CEOs Julius Mbeya and Ash Rogers articulate this vision eloquently in our most recent annual letter, saying:
As an organization, we are deeply committed to community-led health. This means undoing colonial mentalities in health care that create distance between health provider and client. Further, it means ensuring our communities hold real decision-making power in the design, implementation, and evaluation of projects.
As our communities and health workers continue to battle COVID-19, we are aware that there is so much work left to do, but we are not alone. We have seen this style of community-led healthcare make an impact across the world, such as the work being led by our peers in the Community Health Impact Coalition and the many other community-led organizations we seek to center in this coalition work moving forward. We are grateful for the communities in Kenya making change possible and for our many funding partners who, as MacKenzie Scott says so articulately, “seed to cede” our work.
While our journeys have been unique, our vision is universal — a world where communities have agency to lead and a world where there is wholeness of life. For we have seen that when communities lead, change is lasting.
