Kenya’s plastic waste crisis repurposed through chess: a model of circular economy education and youth empowerment
Original framing: “Kenyan children learn to play chess on sets made using plastic waste” — Africa News
The voices of the children involved, the waste pickers who supply the plastic, and the teachers facilitating the program are absent from the framing. Girls in these programs often face additional barriers—early marriage, domestic labor—and their participation rates are rarely disclosed. Waste pickers, who are predominantly women and informal workers, are the unseen backbone of this project, yet their labor is not acknowledged. The narrative also omits the perspectives of parents, who may prioritise immediate survival over long-term chess education, or the local chess coaches, who could provide insights into cultural adaptations of the game.
The Kijiji chess project is a microcosm of Kenya’s environmental and educational crises, where grassroots ingenuity compensates for systemic neglect.
The original framing obscures how this initiative is both a response to and a critique of Kenya’s plastic pollution—rooted in colonial-era trade policies and neoliberal reforms that prioritised cheap imports over local waste systems. By repurposing plastic into chess sets, the project does more than recycle; it weaponises waste against the cognitive and economic marginalisation of children in informal settlements, a tactic seen in Brazil’s *catadores* cooperatives and Cuba’s *joven club* models. However, without policy support or corporate accountability, such projects remain Band-Aids on a gaping wound. The trickster here is not the children or the waste pickers, but the media narrative that celebrates their resilience while ignoring the structural forces that demand it. To move beyond this cycle, Kenya must enforce its plastic ban, invest in waste infrastructure, and integrate these grassroots solutions into national education and environmental policy—turning the chessboard into a platform for systemic change.