COLLECTION,TRANSPORTATION AND DISPOSAL IN NAIROBI 77
(NCBDA) has emerged as another highly organised, resourceful, and influential
group. The group is contributing to security in the CBD by donating patrol vehicles
and other facilities to the police, and is introducing community policing through
training and other support. It has also recently donated garbage storage bins for use in
the CBD. It is estimated that there are over 200 RAs registered in the city, engaged in
improving security, roads, cleanliness, and other services. The associations have come
together under the ‘We Can Do It’ lobby group, which is increasingly influential,
putting the NCC on its toes and contracting, organising, and monitoring private solid
waste collection service. Through ‘We Can Do It’, for instance, about 130 RAs
recently signed a memorandum to the Government on the decay of city services.
Farmers
Farmers are increasingly becoming important actors in Nairobi’s solid waste collec-
tion. The increasing number of urban and peri-urban farmers collect poultry waste,
green vegetable waste, and cow dung as well as food waste from hotels, markets and
other institutions, and transport it to use either as animal feed or as organic fertilizer
(see chapter 12).
Informal actors
Many informal agents are involved in solid waste collection as a secondary activity.
They include waste pickers, dealers, itinerant buyers, informal dump service providers
and informal recycling enterprises (see chapter 8). These actors are involved in all
solid waste management domains, including waste collection, separation, storage,
reuse, recovery, recycling, trading, transport, disposal, and littering through discarded
non-saleable items. They reduce the waste that has to be disposed of.
4.5. NEW PARTNERSHIPS IN SOLID WASTE COLLECTION
Partnerships between local authorities and other agents (the private sector, NGOs and
communities) to facilitate sharing of solid waste collection responsibilities and finan-
cial burdens are considered one of the most important ways of achieving more
sustainable solid waste management (World Bank, 2000). Such partnerships are only
beginning to emerge in Nairobi but support for them is increasing. Broadly, two types
of partnerships have come up in the capital, viz. public-private and private-private.
Public-private partnerships
The best example of a public-private partnership in Nairobi’s solid waste collection
was the pilot one-year management contract awarded in 1997 to one of the private
companies (KRH) by the NCC. The contract involved daily sweeping of streets, roads,
lanes, pavements and markets in the city’s CBD, waste collection and transportation
from the same area, and disposal of the waste at the Dandora dumpsite, at an agreed
monthly rate of Kshs 1,312,500 (at that time about US$ 20,000). The private company