I was born in Mombasa, Kenya. I lived and worked in London for many years, then moved back to Kenya, and now live in Nairobi. TEDxChange@TEDxKibera was held in Kibera, a place that over the years had become quite mythical in my mind.

Salim Mohamed, one of the speakers at TEDxChange, spoke about mapping Kibera. Kibera borders many parts of Nairobi, but in many ways it was a “dark continent” in my world and needed mapping. Often, I may have been just 100 metres away from Kibera, but I might as well have been a thousand kilometers away. I am grateful for being invited to Salim’s talk, for it connected people from far away and from very nearby as well.

I spent most of my formative years in the United Kingdom under the auspices of Prime Minister Thatcher. And she firmly believed that owners are better than tenants and that when people owned something, they looked after it a whole lot better than if they owned nothing.

I believe these are inalienable and deep truths.

Salim’s presentation resonated deeply with me. For a moment, I thought I was listening to the British prime minister and not a Kenyan man from Kibera. He spoke of how he did not believe in hand-outs, how his philosophy was about creating an empowerment and ownership culture for the recipients. He spoke of how Ingrid Munro had told him the following when he was 12:

You do something, we do something.

You do nothing, we do nothing.

Intuitively, I felt connected with Salim. He mentioned that there were 534 nongovernmental organizations in Kibera. “Why then is there still poverty,” he asked. And frankly, I have been asking myself the same question.

I think Salim articulated a 21st-century development approach that can work. The world is more connected than it has ever been. It’s about creating equity, not a free lunch, and I believe Salim was giving us a tool kit for creating that equity. This century will surely be remembered as an information century, and intellectual capital is surely the most valuable of all. When I walk around Kibera I see all this unleashed intellectual capital.

In order for us to leverage the intellectual capital that is in places like Kibera, Salim said that the magic ingredients are ownership and empowerment. I have no doubt he is right.