Our first attempt at a large-scale riparian cleanup in June 2025 started, honestly, with more enthusiasm than planning: we announced the event with two weeks' notice, secured sacks and gloves from a single small donation, and hoped enough people would show up to make a visible difference.
Fifty-five volunteers turned out, more than we expected but fewer than the waste problem really required, and we learned quickly that a full day of manual waste clearing without a truck for disposal simply means bags of waste sitting at the roadside for days, which is only a marginal improvement over the original problem.
That first cleanup cleared roughly 1.2 tonnes of waste from a 250-meter stretch, a fraction of what the 2026 cleanup would later achieve, but it gave us the operational lessons that made the larger exercise possible: request county disposal support in advance, recruit specific groups rather than a general open call, and assign section leaders to keep work organized.
“Our first cleanup taught us more about logistics than the waste itself. By the time we ran it again a year later with proper planning, we cleared more than double the waste with roughly the same number of hours worked.”
— Program committee member
Several volunteers from this first cleanup, particularly two boda boda riders and a group of secondary school students, became repeat volunteers for the environment program, forming the core of what later grew into the wider network mobilized in our 2026 cleanup.
We now run at least one cleanup every rainy season and are working toward making it a quarterly, rather than annual, fixture.
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