Kenya: Vision Africa on Blog Action Day 2009

It doesn't seem right to start a blog in the week of Blog Action Day then not write on that day...so here we are.

As a children's charity, you might wonder what we would be able to say about Climate Change. The point is, our organisation is about creating brighter futures for children and if we don't take action to reduce the impact of climate change, there might not even be a future for our children.

Everyone has a responsibility to do something to help improve their local environment. If everyone in the world does something small, it will have a HUGE impact. Coming from the UK to Kenya, one of the first things I noticed early on was the immense number of polythene bags (known here as "papers") that are strewn all over the place. Whether it's in the slums of Kibera or by the side of the road as you travel between Nairobi and Mombasa, thrown in rivers or just lying on the streets. You find them everywhere. On a trip to the supermarket for a few items you can easily come away with 6 or more bags as things are double wrapped.

This was the first item that we decided to recycle. One of our colleagues told us that charcoal vendors in Kibera can use the bags to sell small servings of charcoal. We duly collected our bags in the office and after our first collection was delivered we were immediately being asked for more. This seems like a much better option than putting them in the dustbins where they're guaranteed to end up being dumped somewhere.

Following on from this, we realised there must be other items we dispose of that could be recycled - even if it wasn't through a recycling plant. Talking with our colleague we discovered that plastic bottles could be used by juice vendors, food tins can be made into home banks and glass jars with screw lids can be used by hardware vendors for nails or grocery vendors for sweets. We started collecting and passing on our "waste". The old adage is true - "One man's trash is another man's treasure".

This all got us thinking...how many people just throw this stuff away every day? At the same time, we were looking for an income generating project for our Seed of Hope vocational training centre in Nairobi. This seemed the perfect tie in. After some initial investigations, we have now set up re:future and hope to recycle paper, glass and plastic.

By doing this we hope we can encourage more people in Nairobi to recycle their waste and have a positive impact on the local environment. The futures of our children are in our own hands - we MUST do something before it's too late!

You can read more about re:future at http://bit.ly/7ldsK