29 November, 2010Organizing new members and building strong union were the key themes for the East African sub-regional meeting in Kenya in November.
KENYA: The leadership of four IMF affiliates and one potential affiliate met on November 23 and 24 in Nairobi, Kenya to discuss and develop strategies to organize new members and build stronger unions in the region. This important sub-regional meeting was also attended by the IMF General Secretary Jyrki Raina and the IMF executive committee member Christine Olivier.
Some of the key decision which came out of the meeting are as follows.
The sub-region has many workers who remain unorganized especially in countries like Uganda and Kenya and we therefore need to intensify our organizing and recruitment strategy. This process should include a discussion between our Kenyan affiliates to discuss unity of the unions in Kenya.
We need to have a target approach when organizing and develop different strategies for different targets especially youth and women workers. The key challenge in east Africa especially in Kenya is the fact that non manual workers are in most cases not allowed to join unions in the name of been part of management and majority of these workers are women and youth.
The meeting also agreed that affiliates should exchange experiences and learn from each other and where possible the stronger affiliates should assist the weak affiliates with resources to organize.
Affiliates should work towards improving their communication strategies and tools to able to provide better service to members. There is a need to train the union leadership about maximum utilization of the new technology.
The issue of climate change was discussed and the meeting agreed that affiliates will discuss the issue in their structure and give feedback to the regional office in preparation for next year's climate change regional meeting
The meeting agreed to develop a project for our affiliates in Kenya to deal with gender representation in the union structures in the workplace. The project will include building gender structures in the local and region and recruiting women workers. We also agree that this project should include building union structures in general.