There are moments in life that define who we are and this August, curated one of those unforgettable moments for young people in Kenya. By nine in the morning on August 6th, the venue in Nairobi was already loud with the energy of people who've been planning something for a year and are fin
There are moments in life that define who we are and this August, curated one of those unforgettable moments for young people in Kenya.
By nine in the morning on August 6th, the venue in Nairobi was already loud with the energy of people who've been planning something for a year and are finally watching it become real. Young people socialising, laughing and setting up their exhibition booths. Someone testing a microphone that kept cutting out. Somewhere in the middle of it, more than 100 young people found their seats and the second Kenya Youth Climate Action Innovation Summit began.
Two days later, when it ended, the story wasn't the crowd size. It was what the crowd had actually come to see.
The Top 30 Under 30 Youth Innovations Awards landed like the moment everyone had been waiting for, with cheer, some ululations and smiles the photographers marvelled at. Thirty names called out, one by one, thirty young founders walking up through applause that kept building, because everyone in that room knew what came after the handshake and the photo.
However, if you wanted to understand what this summit was actually for, the awards stage wasn't where you needed to be. You needed to be on the exhibition floor.
There was nothing dramatic about how Kijiji CBO had laid out their table. A table, banners, and on top of it, objects that made you do a double-take: a chessboard, its dark and light squares fitted together with an almost obsessive precision, and beside it, a row of cloth hangers, sturdy enough that you picked one up expecting wood and got something else entirely. Plastic. All of it. The exact material that clogs Nairobi's drainage during the rains, and shows up in every report about the city's waste crisis as a problem, rebuilt into things people wanted to hold onto. Nobody at that table needed to explain circular economy to you, as the proof was in the palm of your hand.
Kijiji was just the table where the crowd happened to be thickest at any given moment. Walk a few feet in any direction and the floor kept making the same argument in different materials. At Ubuntu's stand, black soldier flies — small, unglamorous, easy to underestimate — doing the subtle yet valuable work of turning organic waste into protein and compost, an innovation that doesn't photograph as well as a chessboard but matters just as much. A few tables down, bags stitched from discarded synthetic hair, of all things, a waste stream nobody thinks to ask about until someone shows you what it looks like solved. Nearby, sanitary pads made from banana tree fiber, familiar to anyone who remembered last year's summit and proof that a good idea doesn't disappear after the applause — it goes back to work. University booths staffed by students who weren't there to observe innovation, they were there because they'd built some of it themselves. You just had to be there to understand the scope of innovation and creativity young people are involved with.
Different materials, different problems, same unmistakable thread running underneath: this generation isn't waiting for permission to solve what's in front of them. They showed up, and they showed out.
By the evening of August 7th, the tents were coming down, the registration desk was being carried away, and the summit that had taken a year to build was, technically, over.
Except it wasn't.
Five days later, Sheila — part of OAY Kenya's policy and programs team, the person who'd spent the past year turning consultations and drafts into an actual document — was in a different part of the city, in a different room, standing in front of a different audience entirely. The African Universities and Communities Climate Week, hosted by ACOPPHE and Kenyatta University, had drawn researchers, university leaders, and community representatives from across the continent. She was there, on that stage, presenting the summit's policy brief.
We're not going to tell you this has already rewritten policy somewhere. It hasn't — not yet, but we are certain it will. What happens next with ACOPPHE is still unfolding, and the OAY team is pushing the commitments made at the summit into new rooms, to new audiences every day.
Let’s sit with the timeline for a second. Most organizations, five days after closing a major event, are still writing the thank-you emails. Still uploading the photos. Still catching their breath. OAY Kenya was already standing in front of a new audience, making the case again.
A summit is a room that fills up and then empties, but a movement is what happens after the room empties and somebody keeps walking, into the next room, and the one after that, carrying the same argument until it lands somewhere it can actually take root.
This year, that walk started five days in. We'll be here to tell you what it turns into. We express our gratitude to our partners, and the young people that attended the summit and made it the success we all envisioned. Your support does not go unnoticed or unappreciated.
Let’s work together to achieve the climate reality that we want to see.
By Faith Ndanu
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