Women squatters turn waste paper into ornaments

For the vast majority of Kenyans enterprise means eking out a living in the informal sector, but with ingenuity can come at least a line of income, as one group of women living on a dump site in Nakuru have found, by re-using rubbish to make products that they are now selling to an international market.

The thirty women, who go by the name of Minyore Women’s Group – Kikuyu for plastic bag – spend their working hours gathering plastic bags from the dumping ground and transforming them into environmentally friendly fancy bags, selling at Sh250 to Sh350.

To make one sellable bag the women need to find 25-30 polythene bags. They then clean the bags and crochet them together using a metal prong and different colours for different patterned effects. Depending on the women’s skill and experience, the process can take anything from one to four days. Since starting the business in 1993, they have developed products that include door mats and carpets. They are also using credit scratch cards from Safaricom and Airtel to make necklaces, sold at Sh200, and glossy paper magazines and newspapers to make decorative money holders and ornaments.

The women live on the landfill site in a place nicknamed ‘London’, on the outskirts of Nakuru. Most of them were left behind by husbands who were drug addicts, alcoholics or have died from Aids-related illness. Now, 200 women and children live on the site, in shacks made from items found on the landfill.

Before, they raised money from their creative handwork they were surviving on the garbage itself, rummaging through it as the source of their daily bread.

But now they are selling their popular products to local tourists and have found distributors in New Zealand, the UK and America to sell their products to the international market. Every month, they ship bags to foreign investors, marketed by one of the women’s sons, Antony Nderitu.

Their bags were also showcased and sold at the United Nations Environment Conference held in February in Nairobi and have also been part of an international campaign called In the Bag, founded by Liz Milwe in the US. The campaign is on a tour to celebrate grassroots recycling initiatives and gain the women, and others across the world, recognition of their plight. Liz saw the women’s bags on sale in a hairdressing salon in New York City.

Every month the women selling about 30 bags, but fluctuating suppliers’ demand often leaves the women surviving on Sh10 a day to feed themselves and their children.

Their illiteracy and weak marketing has seen the women struggle to survive. Wearing clothes from the landfill site and spending their days searching through trash for supplies, they are also often unable to send their children to school.

But while their income is not yet enough to lift them out of poverty, their craft has created a new base, which they hope will one day mean they are able to leave the landfill site.

Lucy Wambui, a 50-year-old mother of three boys and two girls, is the chairperson of the women’s group, attends training workshops and brings back the knowledge to the group. She has spent most of her life living on the site owned by Nakuru Municipal Council and her shack, where she lives with all her children, is directly on the rubbish site.

“We face many challenges, but our work is honest and puts food on our plates. But I look forward to a better future, one where we will one day be able to live free from a life of being a squatter.”

African Laughter