Displaying items by tag: Nairobi

Evarline is hundreds of pounds in debt, after paying a pastor to pray for her. She lives in a Nairobi slum and can no longer provide for her four children. Evarline lost her job so when she heard about a pastor whose prayers could make life better, she went to see him. He asked her for 15,000 Kenyan shillings (£96). This is called a ‘seed offering’: a financial contribution to a religious leader, with a specific outcome in mind. She borrowed the money from a friend, who took out a loan on her behalf. She had been told this pastor's prayers were so powerful that she would see a return on her money within a week. The miracle never came. The loan her friend took out ballooned due to unpaid interest. She has no idea how she'll pay it back. Her friend has stopped talking to her. She still has no job.

A short drive from the United Nations complex in Nairobi where talks on a global plastics treaty took place recently is Kenya's biggest landfill - a mountain of garbage, carpeted in single-use plastic. The equivalent of thirty trucks full of throwaway plastic packaging, bags and containers is tipped onto Dandora dump every day - a trend set to worsen with global plastic pollution forecast to double over the next decade. This global waste crisis, which is destroying habitats, killing wildlife and contaminating the food chain, has sparked calls for radical action in a treaty billed as the most important environmental pact since the Paris Agreement. ‘Our expectation is that when the treaty is signed countries will commit to stop the production of such plastics’, said Hibrahim Otieno, and he is not alone. Three in four people want single-use plastics banned as soon as possible.