NAIROBI, Kenya, Aug 12-For years, Simon Kuria has read Dandora dumpsite like a map.

📻 Breaking It Down

He knows where plastic bottles accumulate after a delivery, which trucks carry scrap metal worth following and which sections of the sprawling site offer the best chance of finding something he can sell.

The work has kept him away from crime and helped feed his family.

But it has never come with a contract, insurance or pay slip.

📌 What You Need to Know

So, when excavators arrived to reshape the dumpsite, Kuria initially feared the cleanup would take away his livelihood.

He welcomes the cleaner sections of Dandora but worries that as Nairobi moves to rehabilitate the dumpsite, there will be less usable waste left for thousands of informal workers who have built their livelihoods around it.

That tension is emerging as the biggest test of Nairobi’s ambitious waste-management overhaul: how to clean up Dandora without leaving behind the people whose livelihoods depend on the waste.

Dandora receives an estimated 2,000 to 3,000 tonnes of waste every day, more than three times the volume the site was designed to handle when it opened in 1975.

For decades, an informal economy has grown around the waste stream, linking pickers to scrap dealers, transporters, storage facilities and recycling markets.

Estimates of the workforce vary from about 3,000 families to as many as 8,000 individual waste pickers on a given day.

📰 Source: Capital FM Kenya