What Mathare Taught Us About Youth-Led Emergency Response

The paper was co-authored by the panelists who presented at the World Urban Forum session: Cherie Enns from the University of the Fraser Valley, George Gachie from UN-Habitat, Safrina Irungu and Faith Adoyo from the Mto Wangu Initiative in Mathare, and SM Shaikat from SERAC-Bangladesh, along with co-authors Doug Ragan from Carleton University and Turning Tides Managing Director, Mary Hiuhu from UN-Habitat, Raphael Obonyo from the Obonyo Foundation, and Olga Tsaplina.

The central finding is that the response worked because the organizations that led it already existed, were already trusted, and had already built the operational systems and inter-organizational relationships the emergency required. The Mto Wangu Initiative, the Mathare Environmental Conservation Youth Group (MECYG), and the Mathare River Regeneration Network (MRRN) were not assembled in a crisis. They were activated by one.

That activation depended on several enabling conditions. Youth were engaged at every stage, from damage assessment through to distribution, community planning, and flood risk mapping, not as volunteers executing decisions made elsewhere, but as co-leaders whose involvement gave the response local legitimacy. External partners were most effective when they played an enabling role: providing funding, technical support, and access to networks while deferring to priorities identified by the community itself. The Canadian High Commission’s decision to fund Mto Wangu directly, rather than through intermediaries, was cited as a model of how that kind of support can work in practice.

Sustaining the response over time required addressing the economic reality that youth could not afford to volunteer indefinitely. Stipends, meals, and cash-for-work opportunities kept people engaged beyond the immediate emergency and ensured that the response did not simply exhaust the community organizations it depended on.

The research also identifies the limits of what community response can achieve alone. Drainage infrastructure, land tenure security, and long-term preparedness funding are structural issues that require sustained government investment and policy change. The response in Mathare was effective, but it operated against a backdrop of decades of infrastructural neglect, and that context has not changed.

What followed was a sustained, coordinated response. Relief hubs opened at the youth centre and two local schools. Aid distribution was managed through public forums where the committee explained openly who would receive what and why. Supported by UN-Habitat, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), and the Canadian High Commission, the response delivered emergency relief to over 4,000 households and restored sanitation infrastructure.

Working in partnership with UNEP, Mto Wangu used geographic information system (GIS) tools to document flood impact across all four wards of Mathare, identifying high-risk zones, mapping evacuation routes, flagging drainage gaps, and marking areas of potential relocation need.

That data became the basis for a community storymap, “Empowering Resilient Communities for a Sustainable Future: Climate-Driven Water Insecurity and Environmental Health Risks in Mathare’s Informal Settlements,” documenting the environmental and public health conditions driving flood vulnerability. The mapping gave youth organizations evidence-based standing when engaging county officials on infrastructure investment, moving the conversation from relief to structural risk reduction.

View the UNEP Mathare Storymap

The longer-term recovery included converting a degraded riverbank into a community green space, clearing waste, planting trees, and installing benches and a playground on land that had amplified the disaster. The park reclaimed flood-prone riparian land along the Mathare River and restored ecosystem function. It also created paid work for youth at a time of widespread economic disruption, integrating livelihoods into the recovery from the start.

This was not a spontaneous reaction. It drew directly on experience, relationships, and organizational capacity built during the 2020 COVID-19 response, the foundation documented in the first study in this series.