What we do
Youth Action. Power that works
We work alongside national and international firms.
Mathare Environmental continues to create opportunities and events that engage youth from all over Kenya. From talent shows to football tournaments, the spaces Mathare Environmental has built are the backbone of the community and continue to look for projects and partners who dedicated to creating a better city and a better tomorrow.
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Embracing diversity
Reducing skills mismatch
Inclusive civic participation
Peacebuilding advocacy
Mathare Environmental helped pioneer the door to door garbage collection program in Nairobi. Residents pay youth a monthly fee to have their garbage disposed of in order to keep it off the streets. This initiative was created to address the unemployment and disease spreading pollution facing the community. Since then Mathare Environmental has added an recycling and upcycling component where plastic waste is processed and sold for reuse. Through a new partnership with International Organization for Migration (IOM) and Plastik Rafikik, Mathare Environmental will be getting a plastic extrusion machine and training on how to produce products for sale.
MECYG has been tackling the issue of pubic space since it’s inception. The Mathare One Stop Centre is situated on what was once a mountain of garbage where youth once slept to ensure the community stopped dumping there. Since then MECYG has created the only football field in a community of 50,000+ residents, countless murals and many other impactful spaces.
By engaging young people in the community MECYG has been able to create leaders and innovations that have forever changed the landscape of Mathare. Through awareness campaigns, talent shows, and providing space for other groups who lack physical space to meet, youth in Mlango Kubwa have created a rich community teeming with culture.
Since March of 2020, Mathare Environmental has worked to stop the spread of COVID-19, the Corona virus, in Mlango Kubwa, and now slums and informal settlements globally. As the co-convenor of the Youth-led COVID-10 Emergency Response Coalition, a network of 34 youth-led groups based in Kenya (Mathare, Kibera, Nyeri and Mandera), Somalia, and now Ecuador, 2,000,000 hand washes have been done through their COVID-19 Prevention Stations. In addition to hand washes, services such as temperature checks, community outreach to vulnerable groups such as women and children, and the provision of public health and COVID-19 prevention information both through word of mouth and through murals.
“The 2,000,000 hands wash has kept the virus low in the slums like Kibera and Mathare,” states Muasa, “This has kept not only Kenya, but East Africa safe and allowed us to open up our countries when others are closing them down.”
