An interview from Visions of a Better World Podcast
In 2024, we had the opportunity to speak with Salim Edward and Viola Wallenius, co founders of Home Street Home, as part of the Visions of a Better World podcast. Their work in Makongeni, a village in Kwale County, Kenya, offers a grounded perspective on what community led development looks like in practice and challenges many of the assumptions often associated with it. You can listen to the original conversation here.
Home Street Home is a non profit organization registered in Finland, Kenya, and Switzerland. Its work focuses on advancing children’s and youth’s education, wellbeing, and health through locally rooted initiatives. Importantly, both Salim and Viola live and work in the community they support, shaping an approach that is embedded in everyday realities rather than external abstraction.
One of the first points raised in the discussion is how easily development work is reduced to simplified narratives, often centred around individuals rather than communities.
As Viola reflects:
“People think it was just one person starting something. But from the beginning, this was a collective effort with the community.”
Viola’s position as a Finnish co founder has brought notable media attention, reflecting broader patterns in how development work is often narrated through a postcolonial lens. Visibility, credibility, and authorship are frequently attributed to actors from the Global North. She actively challenges this framing, emphasizing that Home Street Home is not the result of individual initiative, but of sustained collaboration with local community members whose knowledge, agency, and leadership are central to the work.
This raises a wider question about whose voices are amplified in development discourse and how shifting that focus is essential for building more equitable and representative approaches.
A recurring theme in the conversation is the power of context driven, locally informed solutions. An early example from Home Street Home’s work involved children being sent home from school due to stomach aches. What initially appeared to be a health issue was, in fact, a symptom of hunger.
The response was simple. Daily porridge. Today, the programme serves over 1000 portions each school day, contributing to improved attendance, concentration, and wellbeing.
This example illustrates a broader point. Effective development work is not necessarily about scale or complexity, but about the ability to understand local realities and respond appropriately. Solutions emerge not from external design alone, but from close engagement with lived experience.
The conversation also highlights how climate change is experienced unevenly across different contexts.
As Salim explains:
“Our weather patterns have really changed… sometimes the rain comes very late, sometimes it does not come at all, and sometimes it comes too much.”
In Makongeni, these changes directly affect food security, livelihoods, and economic stability. Climate change is not a distant issue. It is embedded in daily life.
At the same time, local responses from mangrove conservation to community environmental initiatives demonstrate that adaptation is already taking place. However, these efforts often remain constrained by unequal access to resources, technology, and global investment. This imbalance reflects a broader question of climate justice. Communities most affected by environmental change are often those with the least access to the tools needed to respond.
A central insight from the discussion concerns the role of external actors in development work.
As Salim notes:
“You are not the one who has the solutions… maybe the solutions are already there.”
This perspective challenges top down models of development and instead points toward approaches that recognise existing local knowledge systems. It also invites a reconsideration of expertise, not as something transferred from one context to another, but as something that is co created, contextual, and often already present within communities.
While much of the discussion focuses on structural challenges such as access to water, education, and employment, another dimension emerges just as strongly. The role of social cohesion.
“You’re never alone with your problems… we help one another.”
In contexts where formal systems may be limited, community itself becomes a form of infrastructure, providing resilience, mutual support, and continuity. This stands in contrast to many high income societies, where material resources may be more readily available, but social isolation is increasingly recognised as a growing challenge.
The conversation also engages with how the Global South is represented in public discourse.
“We want to show people as they are, full of hope, dreams, and agency. Not just as victims.”
Narratives that focus solely on need and vulnerability risk reinforcing unequal power dynamics. By contrast, centring dignity and agency creates space for more balanced and reciprocal forms of engagement.
At the same time, Salim points to the often overlooked reality that innovation is already emerging from these contexts, pointing to mobile money systems like M-Pesa as an example.
“There are so many things that are thriving… people are coming up with different innovations.”
As Home Street Home marks over a decade of work, the focus is shifting toward long term sustainability.
“We want to move beyond donor dependency,” Salim explains. “Partnerships, innovation, and local solutions are key.”
This shift reflects a broader rethinking of development itself. Rather than relying on externally driven funding cycles, the emphasis is increasingly on strengthening locally rooted systems, knowledge, and initiatives that can sustain themselves over time.
Their vision for the future is both ambitious and grounded: access to healthcare, education, and clean water for all, alongside the preservation of cultural identity and strong community bonds that define life in Makongeni.
“Basic needs should be met for everyone,” Viola says. “But we also hope communities can keep their identity and humanity.”
In this sense, the future they describe is not only about access or infrastructure, but about the ability of communities to define their own paths forward on their own terms.
Ultimately, it is a vision that calls not for more intervention, but for a rebalancing of whose knowledge, voices, and priorities shape what comes next.
Listen to the Full Episode
This article is based on excerpts from the Visions of a Better World podcast episode featuring Salim Edward and Viola Wallenius.
The Visions of a Better World podcast is available on RSS, Apple Podcasts, Spotify and our website.
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