Support Composting by Women in Kibera, Kenya

This report is going to 21 friends who have donated $1,180 to our appeal on behalf of composters in the informal settlements of Nairobi. Our thanks to you all!

Building on your donations we were able to raise another $25,000 last year and this enabled the composters to recover a combined 3.89 tons of food waste – an amazing achievement. I visited them last Fall in the company of their indefatigable coordinator Stella. In this report I want to explain how composting has enriched their lives.

First, a brief recap.

The project began in 2019 after forty women from Kibera and several adjacent settlements attended embroidery training by The Advocacy Project in Nairobi. Twelve trainees decided to stay together and formed an association, Shield of Faith, to tackle pollution and food shortages in the settlements.

Shield of Faith now has 20 members. Almost all are single mothers and ten have children with albinism. Some of these children have been sent to boarding school to protect them against bullying and violence in the settlements. But other mothers cannot bear to live without their children and keep them close. All Shield of Faith members are fiercely protective of each other and their families.

Waste

The settlements of Nairobi are called informal for a reason. Most of the electricity is tapped (illegally) from power lines that run above the houses and sold to residents at exorbitant rates. There is no such thing as maintenance and shortly after our visit Margaret, one of the composters, learned that her eight-year old granddaughter had touched a live wire while playing outside and died instantly. Margaret had to find 14,000 Kenyan shillings to pay for the funeral – equivalent to two months wages.

The homes of the composters are impossibly cramped. Ruth lives with her son, 14, who has albinism, in a single room on the fourth floor of a tenement building in the settlement of Huruma. There are no lights in the stairwell and Ruth hauls heavy buckets of water up through the blackness several times a day. She and her son also share an open toilet and shower with other families that live along the same corridor. Water is so expensive that Ruth saves the water she uses from washing clothes and dishes to flush waste down the toilet. Garbage is taken down to the street level and dumped.

Ruth has no personal space. Until recently she slept with her son on the floor, which was bone-chillingly cold during winter. She has since purchased a bed that can accommodate them both, but the bed now takes up even more space and is squeezed in between Ruth’s sewing machine and cooking area. Trade-offs abound in these settlements.

I asked Ruth why she goes to the effort of composting in such a confined space. Does it not create more of a burden? She answered by introducing us to her Red Wriggler worms, which live in blue composting bins (“wormy bins”) and chomp away at the food scraps. Ruth plunged her hand into the muck and pulled out one of the creatures for our inspection. “I live with these worms,” she says happily. “We have to share this tiny space!”

The partnership works because the worms allow Ruth to manage her garbage. The more she composts, the less she has to haul down the darkened stairwell and out into the streets. The worms also keep the waste free of odor, which is essential in such a small space. Most of the composters clean out their bins every six months.

There are other side benefits. The project has purchased scales for each composter, and Ruth weighs the leftovers after every meal before adding them to her bins. Collecting data regularly in such a confined space requires discipline, but it also produces a sense of accomplishment and a modest income. Under Stella’s system (“pay to weigh”) each composter receives 800 Kenyan shillings a month to weigh and record the amount she recovers. Stella then enters the data into an online “output tracker” that is accessible to our team in the US, volunteers, donors and (if need be) auditors.

The worms also secrete a highly concentrated liquid, or leachate, that the composters drain from the bottom bin. They have named the leachate Lishe-Grow (“Grow Nutrition” in Swahili) and last year they bottled 522 liters, exceeding all expectations. They sold 42 liters and hope to sell more in 2024. Several composters add Lishe-Grow to their kitchen gardens. Stella also plans to use it on a plot of land outside Nairobi that will serve as a center for cultivation and training.

All of this is impressive, but what matters most to Ruth is that she is transforming her garbage – including even worm poop – into something of value. This rounded oout my own education. I visited Ruth thinking that the rigmarole of composting – collecting, binning, weighing, reporting, managing worms, and draining leachate – could only add to the pressure. I left realizing that nothing could be further from the truth. Composting allows Ruth and the others to manage their personal space and gives them agency in a cruel environment that robs them of many basic rights and services.

Food

If Shield of Faith’s first goal is to curb pollution, growing food comes a close second. Most produce sold in Kibera is grown in sewage and this has led to undernutrition and stunting among children. Added to which the food is expensive and can account for a third of a family’s weekly bills.

Producing organic food in a settlement like Kibera would seem to be an impossible dream, because very few families have a yard, let alone cultivable land. In spite of this, twelve composters erected kitchen gardens and grew their own food in 2023. The gardens themselves are miracles of innovation, fashioned from recycled wood and used plastic containers into which are added soil, seeds and Lishe-Grow. Some composters have begun to grow vegetables in vertical plastic towers, which are fed with water from the top and fit perfectly into a confined space.

Most of the gardeners grow collard greens, known locally as sukuma wiki, which is sturdy and nutritious. They also plant kale, cabbage, strawberries, lettuce, cucumbers, maize, tomatoes, onions and pumpkins. Several varieties can last up to 4 months before they are exhausted and need to be replaced with new seedlings or cuttings. The discarded plants are composted.

Stella visits the composters regularly to offer advice and finds that water is often a problem. One of the most active composters, Roseanne, keeps chickens which provide her garden with manure. But when we visited Roseanne’s garden the soil in her plastic towers was drying out too quickly and causing her vegetables to wither. Stella recommended adding some worm castings and compost. Beldine, another composter, has lovingly covered her plants with a blanket of recycled netting to protect them from the sun and heavy rains. Stella’s verdict: “Beldine – you’re a star!”

Does all of this effiort actually produce serious food? I asked the question while face to face with some drooping sukuma wiki in another garden. Not to worry, said Stella, the plants would perk up after being watered. Vena, the owner of the garden, told us that she harvests vegetables three times a week, which is enough for several meals. In addition to the nutritional benefits, Vena also saves money.

All of which was music to Stella’s ears. The idea of growing organic food in the midst of such an unhealthy environment appeals to her deeply.

Change

On their own the Kibera composters will have little impact on a settlement of over 250,000 souls that generates over 200 tons of garbage a day. As a result, they plan to take their model out into the community and become, in Stella’s words, “catalysts for change.”

One point of entry could be public schools, which offer a cooked meal to students every day and in the process generate prodigious amounts of organic waste. Once composting catches on in one school, says Stella, others will follow.

Stella took a step in this direction last year when she and Vena erected a kitchen garden at Project Elimu, an after-school program that offers ballet and art to over 200 children at weekends and many more during the holidays.

The children were happy to get into the dirt and Michael, the visionary founder of Elimu, was delighted to add gardening to the curriculum. “Kibera is very rough on children,” he told me. “But when we show them how tomatoes grow, they want to water the plants. This brings out a kindness in them and affects the way they deal with other children.” One of Michael’s student leaders, Felix, has agreed to serve as a Shield of Faith “green ambassador.”

Under Stella’s 2024 plan, ten Shield of Faith composters will collect organic waste from their neighbors and create “composting hubs.” The hustle and bustle of settlement life will no doubt help. Outside the Elimu center, the streets are alive with street vendors selling fruit, vegetables and cooked snacks like kangumu (crunchy cakes) or mandazi (a local donut).  Some variety of food is found at every corner and most of it generates organic waste that could be composted.

Some hubs are already under way. Eunice collects waste from her neighbors to feed her large garden, which is an island of green in a sea of gray Kibera grime. Several other Shield of Faith members plant and harvest vegetables in Eunice’s garden.

At first sight, the hub idea will not work for composters like Ruth, who lives high up in a tenement block and does not have a garden. But Ruth is determined to grow her own food so she approached the local authority and asked to rent a tiny strip of waste-land a kilometer from her building.

The plot was littered with rubbish when we visited in August, but the prospect of going green was already putting a smile on Ruth’s face. Sure enough, after several weeks of hard work, her garden was sprouting the ubiquitous sukuma wiki and composting was well under way. Stella’s before and after photos say it all.

We hope you will stay engaged with this incredible group of women!

In gratitude

Iain and the AP team

This report is being sent to friends who have generously donated to our GlobalGiving appeal for composters in the informal settlement of Kibera, Nairobi.

As we have explained in earlier reports, the composting project was launched last year by Shield of Faith, an association of women who have decided to take action against garbage and pollution in what has been described as the largest slum in Africa. Kibera produces around 230 tons of garbage a day and much of the produce consumed in the settlement is grown in sewage. Most of the women are single mothers, and several have children with albinism.

I was fortunate to visit Kibera and meet with Shield of Faith this past summer, accompanied by our 2023 Peace Fellow Caitlin, a graduate student at the George Washington University in Washington. The trip was a real eye-opener.

I won’t pretend that Kibera is an easy place to live. Indeed, some of the conditions are really challenging. The main service provided by the government is education. Otherwise, it is up to the inhabitants to secure essentials like water and electricity. Much of the water is purchased from small traders in the streets and has to be carried home by the women in large buckets, often up many flights of stairs. Electricity is tapped illegally from the lines that run above the settlement and then resold. Most of the garbage is tossed onto open spaces.

But however forbidding it may seem to outsiders, Kibera is home to over 250,000 people. I asked Ruth, a single mother and member of Shield of Faith who lives on the top floor of a gloomy tenement, to describe her community. “I love it!” she replied without hesitation.

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Shield of Faith formed after its members met at an embroidery training organized by The Advocacy Project in November 2019 on the occasion of the UN Summit on Women and Girls in Nairobi. We have introduced you to the group leader Stella in previous reports and in our news bulletins. Meeting her again in person, and visiting the homes of her friends, was an eye-opening experience. She is a dynamo!

Shield of Faith began by designing bins for food waste, which are stacked in kitchens. They then added red wriggler worms to keep the waste clean. (The bins are emptied every six months but give off remarkably little odor). Stella keeps a worm bank at her home and replenishes the worms as needed by team members.

The worms produce a highly concentrated liquid or “leachate” which is tapped from the lowest bin, collected by Stella every few weeks, and then bottled as fertilizer with the brand name of Lishe-Grow (“Grow Nutrition” in Swahili). Last year, during the start-up phase, Stella had the product tested at a laboratory, which certified that Lishe-Grow was safe for use on food. Stella then sold several kilos at the annual fair of the Agricultural Society of Kenya (ASK) in Nairobi.

While the income is of course welcome, Lishe-Grow’s most important function is to help the Shield of Faith team grow vegetables in kitchen gardens. As we have reported in the past, these gardens are a testament to the ingenuity of women under pressure. They are made from discarded plastic containers which are attached in rows to walls and filled with soil. The women then plant vegetables and add Lishe-Grow to help the process along.

Their vegetables include Chinese cabbage as shown in the top photo, and are very nutritious. Indeed, several women told me that their gardens supply food for up to four meals a week. This goes a long way in a settlement where undernutrition is rife, particularly among children.

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This formula was tested out last year and proved to be very successful. As a result, we launched our appeal on GlobalGiving towards the end of the year. We also secured a generous grant from the Foundation for Systemic Change to help out this year.

This has been a year of experimentation, to see what works and what needs improvement.

First, and importantly, Shield of Faith has grown steadily and now has 19 members. About half, like Roseanne (photo), have children with albinism and have used embroidery to describe the discrimination and ostracism that they and their children have faced. Their participation is central to the composting project, which is intended to empower women who are marginalized and under pressure. Almost all Shield of Faith members are single mothers.

The project has purchased scales so that the women can weigh their food waste. While this takes up space in crowded kitchens, as shown in the photo of Irene, the women are proud of their disciplined approach and want it recorded.

So far this year, they have composted 2,949 kilos of food waste (3.25 tons), which is a lot more than expected. As well as producing nutritious vegetables this is also combating climate change because food waste converts into methane gas in the landfills. The women report every month to Stella, who enters the data in an “output tracker” on our Google Drive that is accessible to our teams in Kenya and the US.

This year, team members have also produced 386 liters of their fertilizer Lishe-Grow. They bottled 137 liters and sold 42 liters at this year’s ASK fair. This was less than last year because there was more competition from other brands and also less overall media coverage. But it was more than offset by some wonderful new connections that included the 4-K clubs of Kenya, an organization that trains young agriculturalists and works with scores of schools.

As we have noted in previous reports, a key goal for this composting project is to introduce composting and kitchen gardens into Kibera schools, which generate large amounts of food waste. Shield of Faith  already partners with Project Elimu, the largest after-school program in Kibera, and Stella hopes that the 4-K clubs will open the door to many more schools. This would expand the scope and impact of her model considerably.

Here in the US, meanwhile, The Advocacy Project has been making the case for composting at American high schools. This past summer we recruited three dynamic Peace Fellows from schools in Rhode Island – Emma, Maggie and Bella – who have led the push to introduce composting at their schools.

The three can be seen cleaning up beaches in the photo and have described their composting experience through excellent blogs which - we hope - will inform other composting pioneers at schools in the US and Kenya. Eventually we hope to introduce students from schools both countries to each other, remotely or maybe even in person.

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To sum up, Stella’s campaign against pollution and undernutrition has made remarkable strides this year and is poised for another banner year in 2023. We will be reviewing lessons learned in December and will have a new plan (and budget) to share with you early in the new year.

In the meantime, we would appreciate any feedback and encourage you all to compost at home if you are not already doing so!

In gratitude and solidarity

Shield of Faith in Nairobi and The Advocacy Project in Washington