UNTOLD STORY OF Susan Waithera, a school dropout making KES 2 million from garbage collection

Garbage collection is Kenya’s most profitable business, bringing in the most money each week. Waste prospects span from homes to workplaces and businesses, as well as factories, all of which produce garbage regularly, making this a profitable company for you.

Susan Waithera, 42, sold her farm in the community and migrated to Nairobi 18 years ago with barely KES5,000. She established up business at the Dandora dumpsite and entered into the ‘filthy,’ waste-sorting sector after failing to graduate from high school.

Waithera is now the happy owner of a business that generates around KES2 million in a bad month, as university graduates go for low-paying butt-on-a-seat soft jobs like digital marketing and ‘digital customer optimization.’
“I began collecting plastics, auctioning them to merchants, and saving a portion of my daily earnings.” Waithera recalled, “At initially, I was gathering and purchasing from others who had travelled inside the garbage dump before I went to the city in no time.”

When she first entered the landfills, it was a total gangster world run by brutal violent criminals fighting for control of the territory. “It was only available to a select group of particularly aggressive males. Although women were raped and gang fights were common, she ventured to visit and scavenge there.”
She and her husband own a plastics and metals company, which she buys for KES30,000 a day and resells for a profit.
Waithera lives in a Dandora apartment and owns real estate, commercial property, a canter motor vehicle, and a pick-up truck. Waithera commutes to and from work in an old, inconspicuous Toyota Noah’s family van,’ which she also uses to run all of her businesses.

The 30-acre Dandora dumpsite has bred tycoons whose dirty and torn clothes conceal vast fortunes, unknowing to snooty Nairobi residents who turn up their noses as a rubbish truck rumbles by.

You must first get a waste collector license from the National Environment Management Authority if you want to start a rubbish collection service in Kenya (Nema). You’ll need a logbook and a licensing fee to operate an enclosed truck. You’ll also need approval from the local government.