When we talk about conservation, it sounds like a far-off vision that’s decades away to us actually actualizing it. And part of the reason for that may be because we come up with somewhat complicated ways to undo the damage we have done to our environment so far, and this task becomes oh so daunting that we just revert to how we’ve been living and hope that we won’t be walking around with gas masks in five years.
But we fail to realise that everyday people are already coming up with and executing ideas around conservation. One such person is Pamela, a single mother of four who has been living in Kibera since 1988 after migrating from Western Kenya in pursuit of a better life.
Pamela makes charcoal briquettes. A briquette (French) is a compressed block of coal dust or other combustible biomass material (e.g., charcoal, sawdust, wood chips, peat, or paper) used for fuel and kindling to start a fire. In this case, she makes hers using red soil and charcoal dust.
Briquettes work pretty much the same as charcoal; you light them the same way and can use them to cook; the only difference is that it’s not bad for the environment, burns much slower than ordinary charcoal, so it lasts longer, and is also cheaper, with one tin of briquettes costing 30 bob as compared to one tin of charcoal, which costs between 70 and 80 bob. So good savings for your pocket too!
Part of the reason why the price is so low is because people aren’t aware of it (I am guilty of this too, and for those who do, they have assumptions and scepticisms about it- as human beings are inclined to do when something is foreign to them- so they stick to the stuff they know (makaa) and don’t change the status quo.
Most of Pamela’s customers are people who cook food to sell, like githeri by the roadside, and a few people who use it at home to boil their cereals and such, some of whom don’t even reside in Kibera but make the journey to come buy from her.
If even more people knew about it, she would make more profit, maybe even enough to sustain herself without having to take on side gigs.
So this is what her schedule looks like on a day-to-day basis; she wakes up and makes the briquettes in the morning because they need time to dry. On a good sunny day like in January, they could take between half a day and nearly a full day to dry completely.
On rainy days, business can be very hard because the rain either ruins the briquettes or the lack of sun means they take forever to dry, so there’s no winning when the skies turn grey.
After making them, she leaves them outside her house to dry, well arranged in multiple rows, the black standing out in the sun. Then she takes on other jobs, like cleaning the SDA church that she is a member of right next door, or doing people’s laundry, and then after that she sells maize. She has to do all of this in order to feed her four kids as someone who became a widow in 2012. She also lost a son to COVID-19 in 2020, so there is a fierceness in her to keep her other children safe.
She learnt this business from another woman in 2012 after the hardship of being a widow hit her hard. People view the work she does making the briquettes as ‘dirty work’, and some of them treat her with disdain, especially when she’s in the process of making them and thus is covered with charcoal dust and red mud. But for her, money is money regardless of where it comes from, and she doesn’t let the words of those who don’t feed her make her sleep hungry.
She isn’t the only one in Kibera who’s making the briquettes; there’s a few other women doing the same thing too, each with their own customers. There are no men in this business yet. They exist well with the charcoal sellers, since they boost business for them by buying the charcoal dust, which would otherwise go to waste.
She would want organisations, especially those that focus on women and/or conservation, to come in and help. Be it with funding because sometimes affording the 200 shillings needed to buy the red soil and the 500 shillings needed to makaa is hard to come by, or with getting this business out there and getting more people to know about it and make the switch from charcoal to the briquettes.
On some days, she doesn’t sell anything, and on a good day, she could earn 300 shillings from it. Her biggest challenge is earning enough profit so she can pump it back into the business.
Hopefully this piece inspires us to approach conservation from a simpler standpoint. And see that it actually is possible to get things done and keep our environment intact. And to support small Nairobi businesses!
Written by: Makena Ngito
Photos by: Edwin Ndeke