This campaign is specifically to create a large World Speech Day event in Nairobi and use this as a catalyst for other World Speech Day events in Kenya and East Africa more generally.
Your donation will be used to:
a) hire a high quality venue for one day in central Nairobi
b) purchase laptop and mobile phones for the team
c) provide a cover finance to enable the team to spread WSD into East Africa.
In return for any donation, your name will appear on the sponsors board at the event and will be read out at the beginning.
Any excess funds we are able to raise will only go to funding other initiatives in Africa.
Here is the venue in Nairobi:
RAPID UPTAKE
Over the past month or two World Speech Day has run a social media campaign to raise awareness around the world. In that short time, we have added 185 new events across the globe and added 33 new nations to the list of host countries. So far WSD 2017 has more than 60 nations around the world hosting events.
These include Kenya.
As part of this social campaign we have had the good fortune to meet Eddie, a human rights evangelist in Nairobi. Eddie has been inspired by World Speech Day and in just a short time has created a team, set up an event page on Facebook and created a Twitter account to bring in supporters. He has spoken to universities to hold primer events in September to raise interest. He has also engaged members of the Government and Opposition to speak at the event. He is doing fantastic things, just because he likes WSD and speech making.
He has also found a great venue.
He needs funds to cover the venue costs, but also to equip his fledgling team so that they can reach out to other supporters and really make a difference in Kenya and East Africa.
Jimmy Eddie:
The exciting part of this project is that it can be a catalyst for public speaking events not just in East Africa, but if we get the plan up quickly we can use it as a story to encourage others all across Africa.
That's why this is worth funding outside of our overall sponsorship activities. Particularly as the prime tool for recording World Speech Day events - the mobile phone - is the key technology to an emerging Africa.
BACKGROUND
World Speech Day 15th March 2016 was a day of celebrating speeches and speech making. (Anyone can host a WSD event, anyone can speak.) There were over 200 live speaking events in 30 nations across the globe. These ranged from the Parliament Building in Ulaan Baatar, to a school in Palestine, to college campuses across the USA; from Kyrgyzstan to Karachi, from Buenos Aires to Borneo. The US Senate even designated 15th March as National Speech and Debate Education Day.
Many of the speeches were broadcast livestream (to the world) on the WSD channel on RINGS.TV. You can also see some of the speeches on the website: www.worldspeechday.com.
The theme for the speeches was "Thoughts for a better world". And our aim was to reach out to #unexpectedvoices everywhere.
And here is one of those #unexpectedvoices, from Palestine:
OUR VISION
World Speech Day is a speech by an #unexpectedvoice, a fourteen year old school girl in Lagos, going viral: attracting a million hits on the WSD YouTube channel. It's thousands of speeches captured on video on mobile phones, simply, cheaply, globally. It’s a video database of WSD speeches projecting ideas for a better world, that’s free and open to everyone. It’s a day in the world calendar that millions of people look forward to each year.
That's our vision. Help us to build it.
In Kenya and in Africa now..
Thank you so much
Simon
NB Don't forget to visit the website as well at www.worldspeechday.com and join the World Speech Day movement here!
Please click the style of widget you'd like to install
