- Kepsa deputy CEO Martha Cheruto said the pilot project will see youth and women trained on waste management and earn a living through it.
- Nyongesa said the county is working on logistics and infrastructure to ensure waste collection is handled by the private sector.
Image: JOHN CHESOLI
The Kenya Private Sector Alliance, in collaboration with the French Embassy and the Mombasa county government, on Friday launched a waste management project for youth and women in Moroto.
Moroto is an informal settlement in Tudor, Mvita sub-county.
The project, dubbed ‘Creating Opportunities and Alleviating poverty through Sustainable Trade’ (Coast), is worth €33,000 (about Sh4.1 million) and will run for six months, according to French Embassy representative Marie Fidela.
Kepsa deputy CEO Martha Cheruto said the pilot project will see youth and women trained on waste management and earn a living through it.
“It is about building the capacity of women and youth and looking at the whole process of waste management and making a living out of it," said Cheruto at the launch at Travellers Beach Hotel.
Mombasa county Environment executive Godfrey Nyongesa Nato said there is a deficit of collection in the county, which youth can do and make millions in the process.
Nyongesa said the county is working on logistics and infrastructure to ensure waste collection is handled by the private sector.
Mombasa has a population of about 1.2 million people and with the per capita generation of solid waste per day being 0.75 per day, this translates to 900 tonnes of solid waste generated by residents per day.
The county’s collection efficiency is between 45 and 50 per cent.
“This means a whopping 450 tonnes of waste generated every day is not formerly managed. And so it finds itself somewhere where we can’t account for,” said Nyongesa.
He said statistics in Mombasa show there is an existing opportunity in waste collection, which can be exploited by youth and women.
A recent opinion poll, he said, showed Mombasa residents are not comfortable paying for waste collection services to the county government but are willing to pay the private sector for the same.
He said 68 per cent of the waste generated in Mombasa is organic, while 30 per cent is recyclable.
He said this means that 30 per cent of the 900 tonnes of waste generated daily in Mombasa is highly valuable.
In a stakeholder engagement between some of the recyclers and the county government last year, firms are willing to pay between Sh4 and Sh7 per kilogramme of waste of varying recyclable streams.
“The youth and women constitute some of the private sectors that we are looking into to tap into this potential sector,” said Nyongesa.
He said the pilot project will see at least 100 youth and women benefit from it.
Fidela said the project is one of 128 projects that have been supported by the embassy at a cost of 3.4 million Euros (about Sh428.4 million) since 2001.
Mombasa Youth, Gender, Sports and Cultural Affairs chief officer Innocent Mugabe said the project has come at a time when Mombasa is struggling in doing business, thus making youth and women suffer economically.
“We have lost a lot in the logistics business and when Covid-19 came, again our tourism industry was paralysed,” said Mugabe.
He said the project will help plug in into the whole county’s economic recovery programme.
Nyongesa said about 60 per cent of the Mombasa population lives in informal settlements, like Moroto.
He said currently, there are about 1,500 youth registered as waste collectors in Mombasa and are earning a living out of it.
However, there are more other waste collectors commonly referred to as ‘Beba Beba Boys’ who are operating under unregulated system, he noted.
“We are just streamlining the system, not doing away with anybody. We are just streamlining it and making it better and easier for them to reap more income than what they are earning right now,” said Nyongesa.
The executive said once garbage collection efficiency is improved it will be easy for the county to start encouraging recyclers of garbage to come in.
A Sh25 million material recovery facility has been set up in Mvita.
The project was set up last month to support recycling activities.
“We hope that it will be concluded within two months. The focus of that project is to make it easy for recyclers to get recyclable materials,” said Nyongesa.