From garbage to jobs

Waste mangagement is vital for health and creates income

The garbage collectors in the Majengo-slum are paid 900 kenya shillings a month to pick up the trash. At John's Community Centre they ar taught how to recycle different types of waste.

Surrounded by hundreds of insects, a man in a worn out t-shirt empties a large bag of garbage and starts looking for useful items, tomato-cans, plastic-bags, old sandals, and so on. He is one of the garbage collectors in the Majengo-slum area in Nairobi.

About 50 to 70 percent of the Nairobi population of three million people live in slum areas. St. John's Community Centre is a Christian organisation operating in the Majengo slum, an area of mud, dust, sheet metal and stinky pollution.
 

Three years ago through an initiative of the community,  the organisation started an education programme on income generation through recycling of waste.

Today nearly all of the more than 50,000 inhabitants in the Majengo slum leave their garbage to be collected at their doorstep, a service that costs them 100 Kenya shillings a month. The sanitation workers bring empty plastic bags to the households for disposal of garbage, they sort the waste, and bring it to public dumps and recycling stations. In this way they earn 900 Kenya shillings a month.
 

One of the women behind the project is community health worker Elisabeth Mose. “We help the people to realise that even garbage has a value. But most important we help them to realise what potential they hold in themselves,” she says.
 

Ali Mohammed is one of the garbage collectors connected to St. Johns. He lives in a small house with his two brothers. The walls are made of clay, the roof is made of 'metal sheet', and the dinner is one loaf of bread to share among the three men. “We are not supposed to stay like this. We must rise and shine but we must do it by ourselves. We cannot expect anyone to come from outside and help us. The poor must help themselves,” says Ali Mohammed.
 

Under an open sheet in what seems to be the Majengo Main Street, a group of men have started another kind of recycling industry. In a miniature factory they produce lamps from collected tin cans.