How to clean up the slums -- cook on garbage

By Barry Moody

NAIROBI (Reuters) - Entering Nairobi's fetid slums the senses are first assaulted by a gagging stench and the sight of garbage everywhere, some even hanging from trees or smoldering in acrid fires.

The city government does not recognize the "informal settlements" where more than 60 percent of the population live, so no services are provided and no garbage collected.

The result is frighteningly unsanitary conditions.

Rubbish, "flying toilets" -- excrement in plastic bags -- and even aborted fetuses pile up in dumps along the muddy tracks or find their way into the rivers, where children play along the banks.

Garbage pollutes the air and seeps into ground water, or is picked over by pigs and other farm animals, its toxins entering the food chain and causing intestinal diseases.

Now a "community cooker" project in Africa's biggest slum, Kibera, offers a way not only of getting rid of garbage, but of creating work for unemployed youths, and providing hot water and cooking facilities.

The people developing the project, a Nairobi architectural practice, the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) and a Kenyan non-governmental organization, hope it can be a prototype for cookers all over Africa.

The cooker, dreamed up by Kenyan architect Jim Archer, has taken eight years to develop and is still overcoming design problems.

"My thinking was how do we get rid of the rubbish and ... how can we induce people to pick it up. Then I thought, well if we can convert it to heat on which people can cook..."

Industrial incinerators from Europe would cost $50 million. "This was way out of the realms of reality ... and it wouldn't give anything back," Archer said.

He set out to design and find financing for a simple, labor intensive device with a minimum of moving parts that would be easy to repair and require no imported technology.

Archer consulted engineering companies in Britain.

"They just couldn't understand simplicity. They could computer control it. They could mechanically handle the rubbish. But we want this to be labor intensive because there are so many people with no jobs."

FIREBOX FRANCIS

Then Archer found brass foundry worker Francis Gwehonah, nicknamed "Firebox" because of his remarkable self-taught skill at furnace building.