The room smelled of coffee and rain on windows — UN-Habitat, ICLEI Africa, and KDI had packed the 3EP project into a day that asked a hard question: how do you heal a city’s rivers without pretending people living beside them are an afterthought?
ETCO attended as learners and contributors. The workshop pressed nature-based solutions into real Nairobi soil — not as a trendy label, but as roots, stone, wetlands, shade, the boring miracles that hold banks together when storms arrive. Alongside that came ecosystem-based adaptation and participatory planning — phrases that matter only when they translate into who gets heard in a meeting and who gets flooded when a plan fails.
Sessions pushed participants from definitions to practice: how to design interventions informal settlements can maintain, how rights show up in environmental work, how to plan with communities rather than for them. The facilitators did not let anyone hide behind slides.
We left with sharper tools and a longer to-do list. If you are a technician, a chief, or a youth leader working a river line, connect with us — we want the next designs to be tested where gumboots are already worn thin.
