Kenyan slum saves trees, cleans streets with big trash oven

"The changes are too large and too fast to allow planners and policymakers simply to react," it concludes.

Henry Ndede, of UNEP's Nairobi River Basin Project, says garbage from the city is killing off Kenya's famous plains.

"The degradation of the environment of the Nairobi rivers is reaching a critical stage," he says. "With the increasing of the population now to more than 3 million people, the waste problems have actually overwhelmed the ecosystem."

Governments in the developing world are slowly waking up to the problem.

One of the first issues to be tackled is the scourge of the plastic bag. They turn up in even the most remote corners of the continent, shredded on acacia trees or blocking ditches.

They help spread malaria by holding warm pools of water – the perfect habitat for mosquito larvae.

They choke soil and plants, and bleed chemical additives into vegetables and fruit.

South Africa, Uganda, and Kenya have all introduced minimum thickness rules. Other countries are slapping levies on plastic bag production.

Meanwhile, architects in Nairobi have even suggested moving to a new capital to allow planners to start fresh, ensuring adequate roads, refuse dumps, and sewerage.

That may be a pipe dream.

But Naison Mutizwa-Mangiza, chief policy analyst with the UN's human settlement program (UN-HABITAT) agrees that piecemeal solutions can only go so far.

"If you are really to upgrade a slum, you need government or a local authority to go in and put in sewage and drainage and so on, because as much as we might talk about the poor helping themselves, these are things that they simply cannot do," he says. "But there are interim projects that communities themselves can put in place in order to help, and the kind of project like the community cooker might be one such project."

Collection schemes, he said, can be integrated into a network of recycling centers, composting sites, and nonbiodegradable dumps. But they need coordination by the government.

And there has to be a financial incentive, says Andre Dzikus, of UN-HABITAT's water and sanitation department, such as the chance to sell paper, glass, or tin to recycling companies.

"Environmental concerns are difficult to sell to low-income people," he says. "They are fighting for survival. If they have an income opportunity they will do it."

For now, the community cooker is helping clean up one corner of Kibera rather than the whole slum. And its designers are trying to reduce the foul-smelling smoke.

George Arabbu, an architect with Planning Systems, which designed the cooker, admits the fumes are a potential health hazard but that the people of Kibera cannot wait for a perfect solution.

As he points out: "At the end of the day it's a case of weighing risk against benefit and the rubbish itself is a menace."

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