...Then Citizens Got Involved
This story was published by People Powered
In March 2026, two buses carrying 85 attendees from People Powered's Global Convening pulled up to City Park Market in Nairobi. They had come to see something unusual: large, vibrant yellow containers amidst the buzz of people buying their fruits and vegetables. .
It was a solar-powered cold storage facility where traders once lost immense amounts of fresh produce daily to spoilage, now preserving it — the result of a climate initiative that grew out of participatory engagement between the Nairobi City County Government and a local civic tech organization called Civic Voices. The cold storage facility was not the first result of Civic Voices’ participatory climate work with Nairobi City County. It was the next one. The relationship began with a harder challenge: helping unblock Nairobi’s stalled transition to cleaner public transport.
Nearly three years earlier, Civic Voices — then known as Youth Voice for Peace — joined People Powered’s Climate Democracy Accelerator as a small community-based organization already embedded in Nairobi’s civic landscape. They were looking for a more structured way to approach one of the city’s most contested climate policy challenges.
Their journey shows how accelerator support can continue to grow after a program ends, strengthening local practice, deepening relationships with public institutions, and eventually bringing that learning back into the People Powered member community.
According to the Clean Air Fund, Nairobi is home to an estimated 5.3 million people, and around 70% of residents rely on public transport buses/matatus, and road transport is the main source of the city’s PM2.5 concentrations at 40%. To respond to this, the Nairobi City County Government enacted the Air Quality Bill in 2022 and began planning a transition to larger-capacity electric buses.
The policy was sound. But the implementation approach hit a wall.
Matatu owners and operators saw the transition as an existential threat to their livelihoods. The industry is privately run, deeply organized, and politically influential. When the county government tried to push the policy forward, the resistance was fierce.
“It felt like an instant restructuring of the system and the economy,” recalls Collins Ouma, Civic Voices’ executive director. “They felt threatened by it, and there was a lot of pushback.”
The policy stalled. Directives were issued, plans were drawn up, but nothing moved. The political will was there, but the missing ingredient was trust.
The participatory approach
Civic Voices (then Youth Voice for Peace) had already been working with the Nairobi City County Government's Department of Public Participation on digitizing civic engagement through the Civic Voices Platform — an app designed to make public participation more accessible and inclusive. When the Climate Democracy Accelerator application opened in 2023, Ouma saw an opportunity to apply participatory policymaking methods to the e-bus stalemate.
People Powered did not replace Civic Voices’ local knowledge. It helped strengthen the method: giving the team tools, peer learning, mentorship, and a clearer participatory policymaking structure they could adapt to Nairobi’s political and transport realities. As Ouma puts it: "We've been doing engagements before, but [the CDA] put more structure to it and more intentionality in the tiny steps that most of the time will be overlooked."
Over the project period from mid to late 2024, the team organized a series of multi-stakeholder forums — bringing together county government officials, matatu owners and operators, environmental experts, civil society organizations, and citizen groups. They used a hybrid model: face-to-face forums at venues like City Hall alongside digital engagement through the Civic Voices Platform.
The forums gave stakeholders space to name the practical concerns behind the resistance: livelihoods, routes, costs, ownership, and the fear that the transition would be imposed without protecting those already working in the sector. Civic Voices’ role was to help turn that resistance into a structured conversation about how implementation could happen more gradually and with greater trust.
Read the rest at People Powered.
