- TikTok to raise awareness and funds.
- Messaging platforms to coordinate action.
- Deliberative technologies like Polis and Remesh to shape policy outcomes.
What Nerima values most about these tools is their refusal of hierarchy. Influence cannot be bought or performed, and participants must think for themselves.
For a generation shaped by influencers and algorithmic culture, this kind of engagement carries real weight—and it works. One striking example: Youth participation through Siasa Place pressured the Kenyan government into withdrawing a proposal that would have cut funding for youth programming entirely. The outcome showed that when young people organize and speak collectively, they can shift policy directly.
Nerima sees her work as bridging the gap between mobilization and meaningful political participation. "We are channeling our people to understand how policy works," she explains, "and why inclusive involvement matters for the betterment of the majority—rather than allowing purely selfish actors to dominate these spaces." She also points to progress on more fundamental challenges, like making information accessible so that people can engage without feeling locked out of the process.
Mutual Aid as Feminist Democracy
Perhaps the most powerful shift Nerima describes is cultural. Kenyan youth—many disillusioned by the state—have begun to act as one another’s safety net. They have raised millions to bail out protesters, cover medical bills, and support families in crisis.
This is not issue-based activism. It is solidarity as infrastructure.
And it is being led, overwhelmingly, by young women.
Refusing Erasure
Before we end our conversation, Nerima raises a final concern—one that echoes across feminist history.
“These movements are being led by women,” she says. “And women get erased.”
Technology, she believes, gives us a chance to interrupt that pattern—to document leadership, to create an archive of memory as it happens, to leave digital footprints that future generations can trace. For Nerima, this preservation is through Siasa Place. But each of us is capable of participating in it—because the act of recording is itself a form of peacebuilding, as is the full spectrum of feminist democratic work today: patient and urgent, institutional and insurgent, grounded in care and driven by courage.
The first step is simply to choose to take part.
[post_title] => We Will Be Our Own Safety Net [post_excerpt] => Nerima Wako Ojiwa on technology, youth-led democracy, and organizing at the speed of crisis. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => nerima-wako-ojiwa-siasa-place-kenya-youth-democracy-movement-technology-politics-global-women-peacebuilders [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2026-05-15 16:46:48 [post_modified_gmt] => 2026-05-15 16:46:48 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=10477 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )
