During my time as Research Fellow for Mathare Social Justice Center, in Nairobi, I got to participate very closely with MSJC’s Water Justice Campaign which tackled water insecurity. In Mathare, Nairobi’s second-largest informal settlement, water is never just water. It is time lost from work, waterborne disease, children pulled out of school early, and money that could have gone somewhere else. A household here can hold onto a single 20-litre jerrycan for three days, rationing it drop by drop. For context, a single person in Europe consumes between 120 and 150 litres a day.

The scarcity is not new, but its causes have hardened over decades. Mathare was left out of Nairobi’s formal urban planning from the start. Nairobi was conceived as a ‘white city’ by the British Colonial administration. It was essentially illegal for the black population to live in the city, while, of course, it was precisely Kenyans that did all the work for the white colonials. This is why Nairobi has such a large number of informal settlements, of those workers that couldn’t live but had to be close enough to the colonial elites. As such, these slums, and Mathare is no exemption, were left out of city planning, with no water infrastructure ever built to serve it. What exists instead is an informal market: vendors who tap into existing lines, fill jerrycans at a central point, and resell water. Where the Nairobi City Water and Sewerage Company has tried to formalise this system by selling directly to registered vendors.Vendors buy at a discounted rate and still sell high. By creating such a long network of intermediaries, MSJC has calculated that water in Mathare costs up to five times more than it does in the rest of Nairobi. Combining the insufficient supply to such increased costs means that water has become a factor in perpetuating endemic poverty. Unregulated brokers install their own meters to inflate bills further, and residents describe a system where private monopolies control access to something the Kenyan constitution defines as a human right.

Two previous attempts to break that monopoly failed. Public kiosks and, later, automated water ATMs, a partnership between Nairobi county and the Danish company Grundfos that offered subsidised water near the municipal rate, both tried to compete directly with entrenched vendors. Both lost. The reason, according to residents and the engineers who studied the failure, was not price. It was credit. Vendors let people buy water on credit when cash is short, something automated systems cannot do. In a settlement where extreme poverty is the daily condition, that flexibility mattered more than a lower price tag.

The Mathare Social Justice Centre’s water justice campaign is trying a different approach: instead of competing with the informal market from outside, build a source the community owns from the start. The project, called Alizeti, Swahili for sunflower, treats water drawn directly from the Mathare River. The river begins clean in Kenya’s central highlands, picks up farm runoff as it passes through agricultural land, and by the time it reaches Mathare has absorbed decades of industrial effluent from Nairobi’s central business district. For forty years it sustained the settlement. Now it is treated as a dumping ground.

Mike Bwondera, the project’s coordinator and founder of Zira Water, argues the river’s degradation is also its opportunity. Nairobi is chronically water-scarce, but the volume flowing through Mathare, he says, could meet the needs of the settlement’s population without exceeding safe extraction limits, if it can be treated close to where people live. The pilot module, housed in a shipping container at Muthoni Nyanjiru Park, is designed to treat 20,000 litres a day, drawing on riparian land the community began occupying after the April 2024 floods displaced residents along the riverbanks. Rather than let the county redevelop that land, residents turned it into a public park with a playground, organic farming plots, a waste management system, and now the water treatment modules.

The technical pitch is straightforward. The social one is more delicate. A community focus group held in March 2026, which drew participants from local groups including Domestic Workers and Waste Pickers Cooperative , raised the practical costs of erratic supply. Workers who miss shifts to fetch water end up paying twice, once for the water and once to hire someone to collect it for them. Participants also pressed the project’s organisers on training and long-term ownership. The response was a commitment to build local capacity to run and maintain the modules, rather than leaving that role to outside technicians indefinitely, alongside independent, real-time water quality monitoring that residents can access directly, a deliberate contrast with a municipal system where, residents say, water samples are taken and results rarely shared.

In addition, one key factor the project takes into consideration is the social capital that water vendors have garnered in Mathare. Far from disturbing these vendors’ source of income and social capital, the project aims to incorporate them. This would be done by providing them with the water treatment training so previous water vendors can still redistribute the project’s water. In addition, since the project aims to create a steady flow of water, they could still in some cases resell but at a lower price. This way both the consumers and the current water vendors are seamlessly integrated, avoiding alienating any one collective.

The pilot is projected to cost around 35,000 dollars in capital expenditure, with MSJC aiming to raise 70,000 dollars in total to cover an 18-month run that includes salaries and a technical team. So far it has secured about 30,000 dollars through a UNDP youth climate grant and Italian government funding and is now in talks with a local waste-picker cooperative for further investment, a deliberate move to keep capital, and its returns, within the community rather than tied to outside investors whose priorities might not align with the project’s. At the time of writing the pilot is already underway.

The Water Justice Campaign is therefore not only resupplying Mathare’s residents with water. Since this is something that, better or worse, Nairobi water company has done. It is about amending racist colonial policies by incorporating a clean water source supply in informal settlements. It is also about keeping the benefits and ownership inside the community, giving Mathare residents control over their returns without outsourcing it, and retaining the capacity not only to guarantee a more stable water supply but also the capabilities and knowledge to test that water quality. This project thus highlights why locally owned solutions are the only way forward with systemic injustices, since it is the local population who know exactly what is needed, and it is them, the residents of Mathare, not the county government; not a western NGO or water provider, who must benefit.

Ethan Woolf Moñino