African nations are blessed with 30% of the world’s critical minerals. Mineral that the world needs to develop solar panels, wind turbines, renewable energy storage, electric vehicles, defence infrastructures, communication infrastructure, digital economy and many more.

However, past mining activities since colonial era has taught Africa taught lessons. Minerals, particularly diamonds, are widely believed to have been the main factor at the root of Sierra Leone's decade-long civil war in the 1990s. In addition to the Sierra Leone conflict diamond drive civil war in Angola, and the Democratic republic of Congo led to the UN definition of blood diamonds in the 1990’s.

In 2020, the World Bank estimated the production of minerals such as graphite, lithium, nickel and cobalt, could increase by nearly 500% by 2050 to meet the growing demand for clean energy technologies.

Therefore, a world rush to acquiring critical minerals required for these green energy technologies is inevitable.

But, has Africa learned from its past experiences? Should Africa move at the same pace as the rest of the world, or should it pace itself?

Humanly speaking, forests, minerals, oceans, water bodies, and other natural resources are seen as infinite by the human eye. Infinite in the sense that there are more resources to be mined or prospected for, more land to be utilized, a vast ocean and waterbodies that can handle enormous levels of pollution, vast underground water resources that can never be drained, and billions of fish to be caught.

This attitude that the earth has an unlimited capacity and the insatiable human nature to get as much as we can out of the earth for ourselves regardless of the harm we are causing the ecosystem is what I term as greed, and as the late professor Wangari Maathai once mentioned that, “this human greed have created so many of the deep ecological wounds visible across the world today.”

Can we restore balance?

Mangroves are versatile and flexible forests that can cope with enormous disturbances. Dr. Judith Okello, a senior research scientist and mangrove ecologist at the Kenya Marine and Fisheries Research Institute, says that when sedimentation occurs, the mangroves can form a new cable rooting system and migrate when there is space on land. However, due to human influence, global temperatures continue to rise, causing frequent and sporadic weather-related events. When such events occur, they lead to sudden and frequent sedimentation, and the mangroves can get fatigued, resulting in massive diebacks.

To help the mangroves cope, communities have been encouraged to plant. Instead of planting these mangroves, Dr. Okello advocates for a holistic ecological approach that solves the challenges facing mangrove forests. But how did we get here? Why is planting mangroves not the solution to restoring the degraded ecosystems?

Featured today are a group of ladies who are establishing a livelihood by planting mangroves. About sixty kilometres south of Mombasa in Kwale County, in the small fishing town of Msambweni, a group of fifteen women from the Munje village joined together during the COVID-19 outbreak. A community-based organisation with 30 members has developed out of them after around four years. They are planting mangrove propagules along the southern coast of Kenya, around Vanga-Funzi Bay, to preserve a portion of mangrove forest. Additionally, the women are enhancing their livelihoods through activities such as beekeeping, eco-tourism, waste management, conservation education, and basket weaving. Approximately 400,000 propagules had been planted in nurseries by the end of last year by the women.

Today we meet a Kenyan community saving the coral reefs along the Kenyan coast. Coral reefs along the Lamu-Kiunga area in Lamu County, a small archipelago north of Mombasa in Kenya, have degraded over the years. Pate Island, the largest island in the Lamu Archipelago, lies between the towns of Lamu and Kiunga, which depend on fishing. However, fishery productivity depends on healthy corals. How did the coral degradation impact these communities’ livelihoods? What degraded these corals? What are these communities doing about it?

Women in Olailamutia, a town in Kenya's Narok County, have had problems with diarrhoea, stomachaches, and skin rashes for many years. Having access to clean drinking water from a spring is helping to get rid of these problems. Families here got water to drink from a river where they also took baths. The river in question has been contaminated due to chemical use, upstream intensive irrigation, and the discharge of untreated sewage into which they bathed their children. In a town that only gets its food from outside sources, having access to water also makes it possible to grow food.

Narok County is one of 21 dry or semi-arid counties in Kenya. It is home to the beautiful Masai Mara. Extreme weather events like storms and droughts have also become more common and stronger. 

In today's episode, we meet Isaac Macharia, a Kenyan social entrepreneur who makes cabins out of plastic to keep Kenya’s Masai Mara clean. In 2015, Macharia was on his usual tour-guiding routine at the Masai Mara in Kenya. It bothered him. He decided to construct cabins using not only plastic bottles, but also stashing and hiding every non-biodegradable waste you can think of—straws, broken glass bottles, clothes, beer cans, to name just a few—right in there during construction. To harden and convert the plastic bottle into a smaller brick, they add dry sand. The contractors used plastic to make the cabin roof. Contracted local women collect these bottles and fill them with sand or paper.

Picture this. It’s a lovely evening. You and your loved one are seated somewhere, enjoying some juice or beer from a glass made out of liquor bottles collected from a dumping site.

How does that sound? On today’s episode, meet a young Kenyan lady – Mary Njoki, repurposing waste glass at Masai Mara.