The Urafiki Project!

The University of Pennsylvania & FilmAid Kenya Kakuma Mission 2022

The University of Pennsylvania (UPENN) and FilmAid Kenya (FAK) have a history of collaboration and partnership that aims to add value to the skills training for FilmAid Kenya’s film mentees as well as enhance approaches towards learning in new environmental contexts for both UPENN and FAK students. 

In 2022, FAK & UPENN teamed up with Coursera, a U.S.-based massive open online course provider, to offer online courses in filmmaking based on the course materials of FAK’s Filmmaker Training Program. The online course would then be made available for free on Coursera to organizations and individuals working with displacement-affected communities globally.  

8 students and 2 faculty members from UPENN visited the Kakuma Refugee Camp in May 2022, where young refugee & host community filmmakers from Kakuma and students from UPENN produced films that would form visual learning materials to accompany the textual literature of FAK’s Filmmaker Training Program. 

“The original intent at the start of our partnership was to create a spirit of collaboration, networks, and friendship between FAK students from the Affected Communities and those of UPENN. In 2022, we looked at scaling our partnership to look at ways of sharing learnings and experiences with affected communities from around the world, acknowledging that access to information is a human right, and each person’s story has the power to change the world,” says Magû Ngumo,  FAK’s Senior Advisor for Communications & Stakeholder Engagement.

Dubbed The Urafiki Project (Urafiki is Friendship in Kiswahili), the idea is to make FAK’s Filmmaker Training Program course materials available for free on the Coursera platform using a series of textual materials enmeshed with video tutorials against five identified module areas.

The Kakuma production mission was an intensive one-week project that enabled UPENN Students to learn about the history, culture and political context of Kakuma, within the overall lens of the global refugee crisis. It also generated insights into cinematic arts through an enriched innovative learning experience for FAK media mentees.

About FAK’s Skills Development Program:

FilmAid Kenya’s Media Mentorship Training Program aims to provide refugee and host community filmmakers and media content generators from Kakuma and Dadaab Refugee Camps, with the necessary tools for creative arts, and self-expression enabling them to tell their own stories in their own voices. The annual training program equips them with technical skills in Media Content Production, Entrepreneurship, Communication, Community Engagement and Accountability (CCEA), thereby allowing them to participate in the response to their own communities' information and communication needs.