On 31 July 2024, Kasarani Waste Solution was formally registered as a Community Based Organization, Reg. No. DSD/47/280/02/29970, with the Department of Social Development. A year later, it's worth pausing to ask what that piece of paper actually changed — because for anyone doing informal community waste work in Nairobi, registration is less a finish line than a different, more accountable starting point.
What changes when informal work becomes a registered CBO
Before registration, our collection route existed as an informal arrangement between a handful of volunteers and the households willing to trust them. It worked, in the sense that waste got collected, but it had real limits: no bank account to hold fees transparently, no standing to formally partner with schools or estate management, and no structure that would outlast any single founder deciding to move on. Registration as a CBO addressed all three. It gave the work a legal identity separate from any one person, a formal structure for governance and reporting, and the credibility needed to approach institutions — schools, county offices, other NGOs — as an organisation rather than a loose group of volunteers.
It did not, by itself, add a single truck, collector or shilling of funding. Everything built over the past year has come from the same source it always did: fees from households on the route, buy-back sales of sorted recyclables, and the time volunteers choose to give. What registration changed was our ability to be trusted with that work at a larger scale.
A year of growth, in brief
Since registration, the collection route has grown from two villages to six — Kasarani, Sunton, Roysambu, Mwiki, Zimmerman, Hunters and Githurai now all have fixed weekly collection days. The plastic buy-back initiative, which started as an occasional arrangement with a single recycler, now runs from four fixed buy-back points. Our recycling education programme has run sessions in multiple primary schools, and our monthly community clean-up has expanded from a single informal riverbank exercise to a rotating schedule across the villages we serve.
None of that growth required abandoning the informal, relationship-first way the work started. If anything, registration made it possible to formalise the relationships that were already working — turning a friendly arrangement with a recycler into a standing buy-back agreement, and turning word-of-mouth trust from residents into a documented, repeatable collection schedule.
What accountability has meant in practice
Registration as a CBO comes with expectations we take seriously: transparent fee structures, published rather than negotiated case by case; a defined governance structure rather than decisions made informally by whoever is present; and a commitment to report honestly on what the organisation does and doesn't achieve. That last point matters more than it might sound. It would be easy to publish only the successes — the villages added, the tonnage diverted from dumpsites — and quietly leave out the parts that didn't work as planned, the routes that took longer to establish than expected, the buy-back point that had to be relocated after a slow first month. We'd rather be the kind of organisation that names both.
What we've learned in year one
The clearest lesson from this first year is that growth driven by demand, not by ambition, tends to be growth that lasts. Every village added to our route came because residents there asked for it and were ready to commit to fixed collection days and basic sorting habits — not because we decided expansion looked good on paper. The villages that grew fastest were the ones where a committee or a group of neighbours pushed for it together, rather than a single household hoping the rest would follow.
The second lesson is that infrastructure lags behind willingness. Residents have consistently been readier to segregate waste and pay a fair collection fee than our sorting capacity and buy-back logistics have been ready to support at scale. That gap is why a second sorting yard and a planned permanent materials recovery point are priorities for the year ahead, not optional extras.
What comes next
Year two priorities are concrete rather than aspirational: expanding the route into two more villages currently under assessment, building out the materials recovery point that has been in planning since our first months, and deepening the schools programme so that recycling education reaches every primary school within our service area, not just the ones that happened to ask first. None of this changes the basic model — local collection, local sorting, local reinvestment — but it does mean doing more of it, for more households, with the same transparency that got us here.
How we're measuring "success" honestly for year two
Rather than setting vague aspirational goals, we're deliberately tying year two priorities to specific, checkable outcomes: whether the two villages currently under assessment actually join the route, whether the materials recovery point reaches at least its first operational phase, and whether our schools programme genuinely reaches every primary school in our service area rather than just the subset that happened to ask first. We'd rather be measured against concrete commitments like these than against a general sense of "continued growth" that's harder to hold ourselves accountable to.
What residents told us they want to see more of
In informal conversations and through our contact channel over the past year, the most consistent resident feedback has centred on wanting the buy-back network to expand faster than it has, and wanting clearer visibility into where exactly collection fees go month to month, beyond the general transparency commitment we've made. Both are feeding directly into how we're planning year two — faster buy-back point expansion where demand is demonstrated, and more granular, regular reporting rather than an annual reflection alone.
Frequently asked questions
What does CBO registration actually mean legally?
It means Kasarani Waste Solution is formally registered with Kenya's Department of Social Development as a Community Based Organization (Reg. No. DSD/47/280/02/29970), giving it a legal identity, governance structure and reporting obligations separate from any individual founder or volunteer.
Did registration change how collection fees are used?
It formalised what was already informal practice: fees go toward fuel, protective equipment, fair collector wages and route expansion, with surplus reinvested rather than distributed as profit, since Kasarani Waste Solution is a non-profit community organisation.
How can residents see how the organisation is doing?
We publish updates like this one on our blog and are always reachable directly through our contact page for anyone who wants more detail than a public post can cover.
A year in, the honest answer to "what's changed" is: the scale of the work, not its spirit. If you'd like to be part of what year two looks like, our Get Involved page is the place to start.