Advocacy for green space protection works better with a clear picture of what actually exists, rather than relying on a general sense that green space is shrinking. Over several months, we walked and documented every public green space we could identify across Embakasi East, from small pocket parks to larger open areas, to build exactly that picture.
What we counted and how
We defined a public green space fairly broadly for this exercise: any area of publicly accessible open ground with meaningful vegetation, from small neighbourhood pockets to larger open areas, excluding private compounds and land attached to specific institutions like schools that isn't generally accessible to the wider public. For each site, we recorded its approximate size, current condition, visible use by residents, and any signs of encroachment or planned development nearby.
This wasn't a formal land survey in the technical sense, we don't have surveying equipment or legal standing to establish exact boundaries, but it gives a far more concrete picture than relying on memory or informal impressions, and it's detailed enough to support the kind of specific advocacy case we've made around individual sites like the Umoja green space.
What the mapping found
The clearest finding was simply how few sites met our definition relative to the area's population and built density, a small number of identifiable public green spaces across the whole area we surveyed, several of them quite modest in size and a couple showing visible signs of encroachment pressure already underway. That scarcity is, in a real sense, the whole argument for taking green space protection seriously here, there isn't much left to lose before the area has essentially none of it within easy reach of most residents.
We also found meaningful variation in condition: some sites were reasonably well maintained and clearly used regularly by residents, while others had degraded into informal dumping ground status, similar to what we found and cleared along the Greenfields riparian strip, representing green space that technically still exists on paper but functions as something closer to a liability than an asset in its current state.
How this feeds our advocacy priorities
Having this fuller picture lets us prioritise our advocacy and clean-up effort more deliberately than we could before, focusing first on sites facing active encroachment pressure, where intervention now genuinely matters more than intervention later, and treating degraded-but-recoverable sites as clean-up opportunities that could restore genuine public value with a manageable amount of effort, similar to what we've achieved at riparian sites elsewhere.
The Umoja site remains our most active advocacy case, but this mapping exercise has surfaced at least two other sites we're now watching closely for similar pressure, without yet having the kind of urgent, documented case that would justify the same level of active advocacy we're currently putting into Umoja.
Sharing this data more widely
We're planning to make a fuller version of this mapping available to residents, partner organisations and county planners, since a shared, documented picture of what green space actually remains is useful well beyond our own advocacy priorities, other resident groups working on similar issues elsewhere in Embakasi East could reasonably use the same information. We'll share details on how to access it once we've finished a final round of verification visits to confirm the data is current.
If you know of a public green space in Embakasi East that we may have missed in this mapping, particularly a smaller or less visible one, we'd welcome hearing about it through our Contact page so we can include it in the next round.
How this compares to green space in other parts of Nairobi
We don't have the resources to run an equivalent survey across all of Nairobi for a direct comparison, but the scarcity we found in Embakasi East is consistent with what broader reporting on the city's green cover has described for many of the denser Eastlands areas generally, a pattern of green space loss to construction that has been more pronounced here than in some of the city's less densely built suburbs. That context matters for how we frame our advocacy, this isn't a uniquely local problem specific to one neighbourhood's poor planning, it reflects a citywide pattern that Embakasi East has been particularly exposed to given its density and growth over the past two decades.
That broader context is also part of why we think documenting the local picture carefully still matters, even though we can't single-handedly reverse a citywide trend. A well-documented local case, backed by specific sites and specific evidence of use and encroachment, is something we can actually act on directly, in a way that a general citywide statistic isn't.
We're also aware that a mapping exercise like this has a shelf life, conditions on the ground change, a site well-maintained today can degrade within a couple of years without continued attention, and a currently protected site can face new encroachment pressure with little warning. We're planning to revisit and update this mapping periodically rather than treating it as a one-time exercise, so that our advocacy priorities continue to reflect the actual, current state of green space across the area rather than a snapshot that gradually goes stale.