Nairobi's Garbage Crisis: Behind Lagos, Accra, and Kigali on the Fix

Tonnes of uncollected household waste have been rotting along Jogoo Road and inside Korogocho since at least late May, with the Nairobi City County government unable to explain when regular collection will resume in more than a dozen wards. The breakdown follows the collapse of a private contractor framework that the county relied on after disbanding its own fleet, and it has left an estimated 2,400 metric tonnes of waste generated daily in Nairobi with nowhere reliable to go.

The timing is bad for William Ruto's administration. County governments are already under fiscal strain from an IMF-linked austerity programme that has squeezed intergovernmental transfers, and the Gen Z-driven tax revolt of 2024 left the national treasury far short of projected revenue targets. Nairobi County received Ksh 15.2 billion in equitable share funds in the 2025-26 financial year — down from a projected Ksh 17 billion — forcing painful cuts to service departments, including environment and sanitation. Residents who survived the Finance Bill protests are now channelling the same energy into a waste accountability campaign on social media under the hashtag #OurGarbageOurRights.

At the Dandora dumpsite — Africa's largest urban landfill, sitting on roughly 30 acres near the Nairobi River — trucks have been arriving in an irregular pattern since June, sometimes going 48 hours without a single municipal vehicle. The Nairobi City County's Environment Department and the contracted firm Eco-Build Kenya have both declined to give timelines. Meanwhile, the Nairobi Metropolitan Services, which ran waste functions between 2020 and 2023 before reverting control to the county, is no longer in the picture administratively, leaving a governance gap that residents in Mathare North Ward say nobody has filled.

What Other Cities Are Managing to Do

The contrast with comparable African cities is striking. Kigali, Rwanda's capital, processes roughly 600 tonnes of waste per day through a public-private model anchored by Horizon Group, with door-to-door collection covering more than 90 percent of households as of 2025, according to the Rwanda Environment Management Authority. Residents pay a flat fee equivalent to about Ksh 150 per month — far below the informal charges that Nairobi hawkers and community collectors sometimes demand from Kibera households, which can reach Ksh 300 to 500 with no accountability. Accra, Ghana, restructured its Zoomlion contract in 2023 to include GPS-tracked vehicles and ward-level reporting, cutting missed collections by 34 percent within a year, the Accra Metropolitan Assembly reported. Lagos, Nigeria, overhauled its Lagos Waste Management Authority in 2022 with a mandatory waste levy embedded in tenancy agreements, generating roughly 12 billion naira annually for the programme.

Nairobi has tried versions of all these models and abandoned them. The Payable-at-Source waste levy proposed in the 2023 county finance bill died after lobbying from landlord associations. A GPS tracking pilot for county trucks ran for three months in 2024 in Westlands and Karen before the contract lapsed. Informal collectors — the so-called jua kali waste entrepreneurs who serve Mukuru kwa Njenga and parts of Eastleigh — continue to fill the gap but have no licensing framework, no fixed routes, and dump at unregistered sites along Mombasa Road's industrial corridor.

Residents Are Not Waiting

Community groups in Kibera's Soweto East village began organising their own twice-weekly collection points in June, coordinating through WhatsApp groups of over 300 households and charging a communal rate of Ksh 50 per family per week. The Nairobi People's Settlement Network, which has been active in informal settlement upgrading advocacy since 2019, filed a formal petition to the county assembly on June 27 demanding a special audit of the Environment Department's contractor payments for 2025.

The county assembly's Environment and Natural Resources Committee has scheduled a hearing for July 14. Whether that hearing produces more than a press statement depends largely on whether the budget allocation picture changes after the national government's mid-year fiscal review, expected before the end of July. Residents in Eastlands are not holding their breath — they are buying extra charcoal and burning what they can in backyards. That is its own public health problem, and county health officials know it.