Listen, Learn & Leap

12/06/2026

🌍 Come explore the initiative pages on the Listen, Learn & Leap Nature + People Map!

Each profile offers a closer look at the people, organisations, and community groups working with nature across Nairobi and Dar es Salaam.

Beyond documenting activities, these pages highlight how initiatives contribute to environmental and social justice, who benefits from their work, and the challenges they respond to. They also show different ways of working, from governance and financing to scale and motivation, helping us understand how communities support both people and nature.

🎥 Watch the video to see how to navigate these pages and explore the stories behind each profile.

We’ve recently added new initiatives, so go have a look. And if you think your initiative should be featured, we’d love to hear from you!

05/06/2026

🌍 On this , we are sharing the most complete version of the Listen, Learn & Leap "Nature + People Map" to date, bringing together initiatives identified across and .

The Nature + People Map was created to document and recognise environmental work already taking place across both cities. With our partners , , and , we have spent the past year tracing initiatives along rivers, coastlines, neighbourhoods, and public spaces, building a clearer picture of how communities are already caring for people and nature.

These initiatives respond to climate risks, support livelihoods, and care for riparian and coastal environments, often under conditions of insecure tenure, displacement, and limited resources. Yet this work is often unseen, while the areas where it takes place are framed mainly through risk, informality, or redevelopment.

The Map is our attempt to make this work more visible, sharing what these initiatives are doing, the challenges they face, and what they need to continue. Each profile points to ongoing efforts that deserve recognition and support.

Today, we invite you to explore the stories, learn from them, and celebrate the work already happening on the ground.

➡️ link in the bio!

27/05/2026

19/05/2026

Over the past weeks, teams from , , , .university , and have been preparing for the upcoming Open House in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam. These events are an important moment in the LEARN phase, bringing together community groups, NGOs, local institutions, and practitioners to reflect on our sites and explore how working with nature can respond to everyday urban challenges.

Preparing the Open House has meant thinking across two very different contexts at once. and are shaped by distinct histories, landscapes, and environmental pressures, raising important questions about how nature-based solutions connect technical approaches with lived realities and environmental justice concerns on the ground.

As we developed the events together, we worked to align approaches across both cities while preserving the specificity of each place. This meant translating technical ideas into more accessible language and creating space for different forms of knowledge and experience to speak to one another.

The process has reminded us that co-production is not only about designing interventions, but also about collectively shaping how stories, knowledge, and learning are shared 🌱

14/05/2026

❓What makes such an important place for the LEARN phase of ? 🌱

The name Mathare comes from the Dracena trees that once defined the valley’s landscape. Today, this history sits alongside a severe ecological deficit, with very limited green space despite increasing exposure to flooding, erosion, waste accumulation, and extreme heat.

These conditions are rooted in a longer urban history. Since the 1920s, Mathare has been shaped by colonial displacement, rapid urbanisation, limited infrastructure, and environmental neglect, becoming one of Nairobi’s oldest and densest informal settlements.

In Kiamutisya, where is based, steep slopes, poor drainage, and hard surfaces intensify flooding and erosion, while waste and sewage often flow through homes and into the river, alongside ongoing tensions around riparian policy and displacement.

Kiamutisya was selected for the LEARN phase because local groups are already responding to these challenges. is a youth-led organisation working on waste management, urban farming, tree planting, and community mobilisation around health and wellbeing.

Mathare brings together environmental pressure, historical injustice, and strong community action, making it a key site to explore more inclusive and long-term nature-based solutions 🌍

27/04/2026

The field always leaves you with more than just data, it gives the pathways to how and where our team's co-production process should navigate.

After intense weeks of baseline assessments in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, our team sat down to reflect on the one question that is still on their minds.

📢 Which question resonates most with you? Let us know in the comments!

02/03/2026

Action mode: ON! 🌍✨
This Tuesday, 3rd March, the team hits the ground in Nairobi for a community cleanup with Green Park!

We are stepping out of the planning and into the field. This event marks the start of our LEARN baseline exploration, where we stop talking about strategies and start working alongside the community though local mobilisation processes.

In a city as dynamic as Nairobi, the best way to learn is by doing. We are excited to see the local action and uncover the fragments of culture and care that keep these spaces alive.

Watch our stories next week for a snapshot of the day! ➡️📸

20/02/2026

The Learn phase is officially underway! 🌱

Moving from listening to learning means lots of behind-the-scenes work to keep our project ethical, inclusive, and grounded in local knowledge.

Our interdisciplinary, multicultural team has been busy preparing for the next steps:

🔹 Mapping existing, site-specific knowledge from literature
🔹 Deep dives into gender and intersectionality to understand local power dynamics
🔹 Exploring African knowledges, culture, nature, and co-design
🔹 Training in autoethnography to better capture co-production processes

Swipe to see some of our workshop energy! ➡️📸

Nairobi DarEsSalaam

10/02/2026

We kicked off the NbS workshop series with a first session led by , focused on , , and 🌿

Researchers from across NERC-funded NbS projects shared experiences, emerging insights, and challenges, connecting gender frameworks with lived realities across Sub-Saharan Africa.

This marks the start of a new for NbS workshop series, building a growing community of practice across East Africa 🤝

Huge thanks to Jusic for the beautiful visual documentation that captured how each team is engaging with gender in their work ✍️

More to come, stay tuned! 🙌

29/01/2026

Why do communities of practice matter for urban nature and climate resilience?

Over the past year, Listen, Learn & Leap has supported spaces where communities, practitioners, researchers, and institutions learn from one another as peers.

We saw this when Nugget Development Tanzania, working along the Msimbazi River, shared their experience with practitioners from across East Africa through R U NbS regional community of practice.

🌱 Shifting who is seen as an expert matter for how resilience is understood and practiced. The same approach guided our Future Scenarios workshops in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, where lived experience helped ground conversations about more just river futures.

Our Nature+People Map helps connect these efforts and make community-led work visible. If your initiative should be included, we would love to hear from you!

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