- Malasen Hamida, a Nubian Muslim woman from Nairobi’s Kibera, hopes to gain a seat in the Kenyan Parliament as she continues her work in environmental activism.
- Hamida founded the Mazingira Women Initiative, focusing on waste management, smart farming, land rights and women’s leadership.
- She spoke with Mongabay about the history of her people, who were brought to East Africa as soldiers in the King’s African Rifles and given 1,698 hectares, an area that has since diminished to 116 hectares.
- She says the fact that Mazingira is women-led is strategic: “If an environmental issue becomes a priority for a woman, she will ensure it works because she knows it is not for her alone. It is for the long-term well-being of the whole family.”
Malasen Hamida, a Nubian Muslim woman from Kibera, in Nairobi, is an aspiring politician and an environmental activist with more than 25 years of advocacy behind her. Kibera, which was named by Nubians, meaning “land of forests,” is Kenya’s largest informal settlement and sits on land that the British colonial government allocated to the Nubian community after their forebears served as soldiers in the King’s African Rifles. That allocation once covered 1,698 hectares (4,197 acres). Today, due to urbanization, forced evictions, land-grabbing and successive government projects, only 116 hectares (288 acres) remain under Nubian ownership, with no compensation ever offered.
Through the Mazingira Women Initiative, Hamida has spent those years organizing around waste management, smart farming, land rights and women’s leadership. (“Mazingira” is a Swahili word for environment or nature.) She is also a three-time parliamentary candidate for the Kibera constituency and intends to run again in 2027.
Hamida spoke with Mongabay on a cold Saturday afternoon, just as she was leaving the largest mosque in Kibera constituency. Her offices are a short walk away. As we moved toward them, several people stopped to greet her. She responded to each, “salaam aleikum,” paused to chat, and cupped a small girl’s face in her hands. She led me through a corrugated iron gate into a quiet compound of mud-walled, iron-roofed houses. The area was noticeably clean, with no stagnant water or litter in sight, unlike the typical sight in Kibera. We settled on the veranda of her home.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Mongabay: Take me back to the moment you decided to found the Mazingira Women Initiative. What was happening in Kibera that made you think: This has to exist, and I have to build it?
Malasen Hamida: I grew up in Kibera when it was a beautiful, green and serene village. I remember many homesteads and an abundance of fruit trees — avocados, mangoes, pomegranates, pears and many others. As a pastoral community, we comfortably practised farming and animal rearing. We even grew our own herbs, like dhania (coriander).
Over time, urbanization changed everything. As land use shifted from farming to housing developments, environmental challenges trickled in. Poor waste management became, for me, the final blow to Kibera’s beauty and lost glory. Mazingira is my small way of rebuilding what we once knew Kibera to be. I started by mobilizing women to clean streets and drainage systems. Later, we introduced smart farming — using hydroponics, vertical gardening and methods of converting waste into resources that now support kitchen gardens. Today, women can grow enough food to feed their families and sell the surplus. Witnessing that transformation has been deeply rewarding.
Mongabay: You are Nubian, from a community that has lived in Kibera for generations but has rarely been centred in conversations about it. How does that history shape how you see the environmental crisis unfolding around you?
Malasen Hamida: Our forefathers were brought to East Africa as soldiers in the [King’s] African Rifles from areas that are today southern Egypt and northern Sudan to support British military campaigns during the world wars. After their service, they were resettled here. We were in Kibera before Nairobi became the city it is today. In 1917, we were surveyed and allocated 4,197 acres. Through land-grabbing and forced evictions, we have been reduced to 288 acres, with no compensation offered to our people.
Coming from a minority community has deeply shaped my understanding of these issues. For many years after independence, there was a perception that Nubians did not fully belong in Kenya. That is why many of us became involved in activism and advocacy — to remind the country that our presence here is part of its history. When I think about environmental crises in Kibera, I cannot separate them from land [injustices], displacement and dispossession. The shrinking of land and unplanned urban growth have transformed both the physical environment and people’s relationship with the place they call home.
Mongabay: After the 1998 Nairobi bomb blast, something shifted for the Nubian community in Kibera. What changed, and how does that history connect to the environmental and land struggles you have been describing?
Malasen Hamida: Before 1998, we were already a community fighting for recognition. After the blast, we became a community under suspicion. Because we are Muslim, because our names resemble Arab or Somali names, because our language carries the cadence of Arabic (Nubi is Sudanese Arabic-based creole), the government began treating us as a security question rather than a people with a history and a home. I got my identity card before all of that. My peers were not so fortunate.
To get a national ID, a birth certificate, a passport and documents that every Kenyan is entitled to, members of my community had to undergo rigorous vetting. Prove they belonged. Prove they were Kenyan. Imagine being asked to prove you belong to a country your grandfather helped build, on land your family has occupied for over a century, in a city that grew around you. That is what we were asked to do.
And this is why the environmental struggle and the citizenship struggle are not two separate things. If you cannot access a document, you cannot own land formally, you cannot vote, and you cannot be counted. You become invisible to the state, except when the state sees you as a threat. So when I talk about Kibera’s environmental crisis, I am also talking about a community that has been systematically made difficult to see. Cleaning the streets, growing food, organizing women, this is also how we insist on our visibility.
Mongabay: Why did you make a deliberate choice to build a women-led initiative? What told you that women needed to be the ones leading this?
Malasen Hamida: Women are the producers and the organizers of waste. In the production of food, they interact with both raw materials and the waste that comes from it. As organizers of the home, women are also statistically the largest shareholders of small-scale farms in Kenya and often the custodians of waste management within their households.
Targeting women was strategic because it is an entry point to waste management, food production and economic empowerment. If an environmental issue becomes a priority for a woman, she will ensure it works because she knows it is not for her alone. It is for the long-term well-being of the whole family. Compared to men, they view waste management as temporary work until they find an alternative career. For women, this is a sustained commitment, and that’s our leverage.
Mongabay: What do women in Kibera experience in relation to the environment, the flooding, the waste, that men in the same settlement do not experience in the same way?
Malasen Hamida: Women carry much of the burden because they are typically responsible for managing the household. Poor drainage systems clogged with waste lead to severe flooding inside homes. Women are usually the first to deal with water entering the house, the immediate disruption, the children to keep safe and the cleanup.
There is also a specific health burden. Environmental pollution creates conditions for disease, and women often become the primary managers of household health and preventive care. If the environment is polluted, they cannot easily protect their children from the resulting illnesses. When the rains come, I see narrow streams transform into fatal rivers that gain enough power to destroy homes and claim lives. Through Mazingira, we organize emergency cleanups to unblock drainage systems so water can recede, and we encourage rainwater harvesting for our smart farms [space-efficient systems that use vertical gardens, water-recycling technology and waste-to-soil conversion to grow food where conventional agriculture cannot], because while many see the rain as a disaster, those of us practising urban farming know it is also a resource.
Mongabay: Kitchen gardening and waste management are often dismissed as small-scale or household solutions. What do you think about the scale and significance of this work, especially when larger climate policy conversations rarely include communities like Kibera?
Malasen Hamida: People may call this small-scale, but for us, it is the foundation. We convert food waste into manure and waste paper into briquettes [for home use and for sale], which prevents us from cutting trees and creates green jobs for youth and women. Because our land has been squeezed and taken from us, we champion smart agriculture to ensure food security for families with nowhere left to farm. We have even partnered with the European Union and the We World consortium to install a greenhouse in one of our schools so children can learn these skills firsthand.
This is also primary healthcare. Maintaining a clean, well-groomed environment is preventive care because it stops sickness before it starts. Yet Nairobi has been excluded from mitigation funds like FLoCCA [Financing Locally-Led Climate Action], often because policymakers do not see the grassroots reality of our struggle. Global climate conversations focus almost exclusively on forests and rural lands, while overlooking how urban solid waste could be turned into a carbon sink that benefits the urban poor. The potential is enormous. The recognition is almost nonexistent.
Mongabay: You have contested political office three times. Most people would step back after one loss. What has kept you returning to the ballot?
Malasen Hamida: Giving up is not an option. I might feel like giving up, but when I step outside, someone is asking, ‘Mama Mazingira, what do we do about this?’ Giving up would mean giving up on my people, on my dreams and on the voices that are amplified through me.
My political journey grew directly from community advocacy. While doing civic education on the 2010 Constitution, I watched the larger Langata constituency split into Langata and Kibera, and I saw an opportunity to represent the Nubian community, because in the new Constitution [promulgated in 2010], my community is not recognized under affirmative action. The Council of Elders has been consistently supportive; every election year, they convene a vetting process for all aspirants, and I have emerged from it each time. The challenge has been demographics. The Nubian community is a minority within Kibera, which makes mobilizing votes difficult. But through three campaigns, I have built visibility around environmental justice, and that is slowly creating momentum.
I believe: It is not done until it is done.
Mongabay: If you win in 2027, what is the first environmental priority?
Malasen Hamida: My priority would be to domesticate the Sustainable Waste Management Act of 2022 with clear, workable frameworks at the grassroots level. I also want to explore how urban communities can access carbon markets and turn solid waste into an economic resource. Carbon markets should not only benefit rural forests. Communities like ours, which have been excluded from climate finance, need to be explicitly written into the next round of mitigation funding conversations.
Mongabay: What do you want readers outside Kenya, outside informal settlements, to know about the women doing this conservation work quietly, without grants, without platforms, without recognition?
Malasen Hamida: These women are not simply participants in a program. They are the primary producers and organizers of our community. In some of the most crowded spaces on Earth, they are innovating, using vertical gardens and hydroponics to ensure their children have food when there is no land left to farm. They see waste as a resource. They are creating green jobs and transactional businesses from what others call trash. Yet they are still absent from global conversations about the carbon market and climate finance.
Ten years from now, I want the women of Mazingira to say this initiative gave them economic independence and the dignity of self-sufficiency. I want them to say it gave them leadership, a voice, and the confidence to carry the conversation of environmental conservation to any table. And I want them to say they played a personal role in restoring the glory of Kibera, so that the next generation inherits a greener, more liveable home than the one we were handed.
The world may overlook them. But the work they are doing is shaping the future of environmental justice.
Banner image: Through the Mazingira Women Initiative, Malasen Hamida has spent years organizing around waste management, smart farming, land rights and women’s leadership. Image courtesy of Malasen Hamida.
Cite this article
Ouma Elvine Tina (2026). Waste, women & environmental justice: Interview with Nubian activist Malasen Hamida. Mongabay Conservation news. DOI: https://doi.org/10.66709/news-323283Credits
