Who gets to write the city’s future?

That’s a question that sits beneath every city as it grows, modernises and changes.

It shapes where roads are built and where they are not. Which neighbourhoods receive investment and which are forgotten. Whose homes are protected and whose are demolished. Which stories are told, and whose are left unheard.

It is a remarkably simple question.

Who gets to write the future?

For many of us, the answer seems obvious. Governments. Planners. Architects. Engineers. Politicians. The trained urban development specialists. The ‘experts’.

But spend time with Muungano wa Wanavijiji in Nairobi and you begin to see the city differently. Looking from the perspective of the communities who call it home, it quickly becomes clear that perhaps we have been asking the wrong people all along.

Because within this way of thinking, the people who know their communities best are rarely trusted to shape them. Instead, they are too often told what they need.

Jarvis Kasindi put it simply at our Community-Building Summit last month:

“Why do they come here and tell us what we need? Why don’t they ask us what we need? It might be completely different.”

That question has stayed with us ever since, because it is not really about consultation. It is about who gets to imagine the future in the first place.

Over the past thirty years, Muungano has shown that communities living in informal settlements are not waiting for someone else to solve their problems. They are already analysing them, organising around them and designing solutions together. What they have too often lacked is not knowledge or ideas, but the opportunity to turn those ideas into reality.

That is why it feels misleading to describe Muungano simply as an advocacy movement. Advocacy is certainly part of what they do, but it is only the visible expression of something much deeper. Beneath it lies the patient work of bringing people together to imagine a different future and giving them the confidence, skills and relationships to build it.

You can see this throughout the movement.

When devastating floods repeatedly hit communities across Nairobi, Muungano did not begin by asking what project could be funded. They began by asking people what they had experienced. Community conversations uncovered needs that no outsider would have identified: somewhere to store emergency supplies, equipment that could be accessed quickly, a safe place for counselling after disasters. From those conversations emerged the idea of a Resilience Hub. It was not imported from elsewhere or designed in an office. It was imagined by the people who would use it.

The same is true of the work on drainage and waste management in Kiamaiko. From the outside, it might look like an infrastructure project. But the real work was bringing communities together to understand how the whole system functioned, to negotiate difficult decisions, educate one another and take collective responsibility for problems that no household could solve alone. Community members trained to carry out specialist drainage work themselves, keeping both the expertise and the employment within the community. The drains mattered because they reduced flooding. They also mattered because they demonstrated what became possible when a community saw itself as capable of shaping its own future.

That same spirit runs through Mukuru’s Special Planning Area, where communities were trusted to design the future of their settlement. It runs through Talking Walls, where young people painted their hopes for their communities into public view. It runs through KYCTV, where young people tell their own stories instead of allowing others to define them. It runs through youth cafés, exchange visits and community action plans. None of these activities are ends in themselves. They are different ways of asking the same question: what kind of future do we want, and how do we build it together?

Perhaps that is why Muungano has worked so hard to create different pathways for young people into the movement. Traditional approaches did not resonate with everyone, and they recognised that there could never be a single route into community organising. Some young people are inspired by advocacy, others by filmmaking, podcasts or murals. Some are drawn to climate action, others to mental health, mentoring or waste management. What matters is not the activity itself but the opportunity to discover that your ideas matter, your experiences matter and you have something valuable to contribute to your community.

Once that happens, something remarkable begins to unfold.

Young people do not simply participate; they become leaders. They train others, organise conversations, create awareness and inspire action. One person becomes many. One conversation becomes another. One local success opens the door to tackling the next challenge. Throughout our visit, people spoke about these ripple effects. The movement grows not because one project finishes and another begins, but because people carry what they have learned into new places, new relationships and new communities.

Listening to these stories, we found ourselves reflecting on something development so often gets wrong.

We tend to assume that change begins with a solution. We identify a problem, design an intervention and then look for people to participate in it.

Muungano turns that logic on its head.

Change begins with people coming together to understand their own realities, to have honest conversations about the challenges they face and to imagine what could be different. The solutions emerge from that collective process. They are not always predictable, and they rarely fit neatly into predefined project plans. That is precisely why they work.

It also helps explain why this kind of work is so difficult to fund.

You cannot know in advance whether young people will choose murals or podcasts, mapping or community theatre, advocacy or savings groups. You cannot predict which conversation will spark the next idea, or which small initiative will grow into a city-wide movement. Collective imagination does not fit neatly into a logframe, the dominant tool many funders still use to design, manage and evaluate projects.

Yet it is exactly this flexibility that allows movements like Muungano to flourish.

During our Community-Building Summit, Rebecca from Play it Forward reflected that unrestricted funding gives communities “the control to implement the change with passion…the way you need to do it, with courage and not fear.” Her words captured something we had seen throughout the week. Flexible funding is not simply about removing restrictions. It creates the space for communities to respond to what emerges, to follow the energy of their members and to keep adapting as new opportunities arise. It allows imagination to become action.

Muungano’s work is not really about advocacy, community planning or even youth organising.

It is about creating the conditions in which people can imagine a different future together, believe that future is possible and organise to make it real.

At One World Together, this is why we believe solidarity matters so much. Communities already hold the knowledge, relationships and determination to transform their own futures. What they so often lack is funding that trusts them to decide how best to do it.

Because before anyone can build a different future, they must first have the chance to imagine one.

And surely the people who should write the future of a community are those who call it home.

Every community deserves the chance to write its own future. Through our Solidarity Fund, your support helps make that possible by placing trust, flexibility and decision-making where they belong: in the hands of communities themselves.