Mukuru Stakeholders Co-Create Robust Action Plans for Flood Mobility

In the heart of Nairobi, the Mukuru informal settlement is a landscape of profound contrasts. Home to over 400,000 residents packed into just 2.7 square kilometers, it is a vibrant hub of economic and social life. Yet, it is also deeply vulnerable to the devastating impacts of climate change. Sitting in a low-lying floodplain, 40 meters lower than the Nairobi average, Mukuru faces recurrent, brutal flooding from the Ngong River. But while the threat of flood-induced mobility is a daily reality, the community refuses to simply wait for the water to rise. Recently, under the banner of Exploratory Scenario Planning (XSP), community members, government officials, and researchers gathered for Workshop 2, transitioning from imagining the future to actively shaping it.

This gathering, hosted by Nuvoni Centre for Innovation was the crucial second phase of an ambitious project aimed at developing a replicable XSP toolkit for flood-induced mobility in informal settlements. Workshop 1 had laid the groundwork, with participants utilizing the 2PESTELD framework to identify and rank the most critical drivers of mobility. They pinpointed four major forces: livelihood, political goodwill, waste and sanitation, and land value. By pairing these drivers along axes of uncertainty and importance, they developed twenty-four distinct scenario narratives, later evaluated using the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy logic to select four high-ranking, plausible futures. These were named Thriving Mukuru (characterized by responsive governance and reliable services), Resilient Resolve (relying on community self-organization amid state failure), Displacement and Fragmentation (a vicious cycle of mobility and land conflicts), and Up-for-Grabs (marked by improved services but also gentrification and displacement risks).