Gender equity and social inclusion
Here are some of the Flipflopi’s tips for building a welcoming and inclusive culture.
1. Start with open recruitment criteria that don’t discriminate based on gender, age, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or disability. Share opportunities fairly – for short-term, casual and long-term jobs, as well as training and education.
2. Be intentional in your recruitment. If you want to reach underrepresented groups, you may need to take active steps to involve them. Once recruited, ensure they stay. In our early years, we faced real challenges, like resistance from spouses when women joined our team. These things are not always easy to manage, but they are critical. A strong HR system – or at least someone with good people skills and sensitivity – makes a big difference.
3. Create inclusive hiring pathways for those without formal qualifications but with solid work experience or attitude. Pair this with tools or machines that reduce heavy lifting – opening up physically demanding jobs to women and people with disabilities.
4. Work with existing community groups, and share revenues fairly. Buy and produce locally whenever possible – whether it’s tools, transport or equipment – so the benefits ripple out through the wider community.
5. Include social programmes that improve wellbeing. Some of ours have included vocational training, PPE distribution, school supplies, first aid training, food support, small business grants, and distribution of sanitary products.
6. Foster a culture of equity inside your organisation through training, codes of conduct, and clear SOPs on safeguarding and ethics. Track your progress by collecting gender- and age-disaggregated data – this will show who is really benefitting.
7. Build in clear channels for complaints and feedback. We do this with an HR administrator, anonymous surveys, incident forms, and regular team meetings across departments.
8. Finally, respect and promote indigenous knowledge. We’ve learned a lot, for example, by listening to local expertise on mangroves – which has shaped our clean-up and restoration work alongside scientific methods.
How the Flipflopi did it...
Case Study: Flipflopi–Mtaa Safi Business Accelerator
In Lamu, waste collection is largely informal. Most collectors pick up waste from open dumps, beaches, streets and neighbours (Flipflopi, 2023). With few associations and little collaboration between them, waste collectors have limited opportunities to increase their earnings or build more stable livelihoods.
In 2024, we launched a business accelerator pilot in partnership with Mtaa Safi – a youth group based in Nairobi – to support waste collectors in Lamu. The aim was to provide business development training and create sustainable income streams, while encouraging community-led innovation in how waste is collected across the archipelago.
The accelerator focused on three main goals:
- Promote collective responsibility by supporting new ideas for community-based waste collection.
- Improve income and job security for waste collectors by helping to formalise and grow their work.
- Make waste collection more structured and efficient, reducing reliance on informal street collection and preventing waste from ending up in the environment.
We kicked off the three-month, part-time pilot in 2024 with a cohort of ten female waste collectors. They took part in training on leadership, computer basics, community development, programme design, communication, waste management, the circular economy, business development, financial management and reporting.
During the programme, the participants split into two groups and developed business plans, which they successfully pitched. Eight collectors graduated in December 2024. Now working as registered self-help groups, they each received micro-finance support to kickstart their new businesses in early 2025.
Each business is trialling a barter system, where local residents can trade household plastic waste for goods from the shop. The idea is to create an incentive for proper disposal at the household level – keeping plastic out of the environment while building shared responsibility for recycling.
Importantly, the loans are interest-free. The groups will repay them slowly into a central fund that can support the scaling and sustainability of their businesses in future.
