2022 has been a busy year for our project, and especially for our partners Chemolex. With COVID restrictions ending, it has been possible not just to remove record quantities of plastic wastes from the rivers in and around Nairobi, and innovate new designs for equipment to help with the job, but also the public engagement part of the project has been able to accelerate as well.
Our work with community groups to transform riverside dump sites into community gardens is yielding positive results, as the stark contrast of the photos above illustrates. And these results are repeated across all the former dumpsites and riverside communities that Chemolex has engaged with.
With the increase in public engagement opportunities this, year, we have resumed our schools outreach programme, with a mixture of (high-energy) engagement and education events, school litter-picking and community clean-up days, and school garden-creation programmes.
We were lucky enough that the funders of the project, the Benioff and Coca-Cola Foundations, working through the University of California, Santa Barbara, agreed to extend the project by a further year. As the picture below shows, there is plenty more work to do alongside Nairobi’s rivers….
You can download a copy of our year 3 report by clicking on the image below.
