Nighat is a 40-year-old woman hailing from UC Saeedabad, District Kemari, Karachi. Her family of five, including her husband, son and her daughter-in-law, live in a small house. 

As part of the UKAM project, Tearfund Pakistan has established a Haryali Hub (recycling unit) in Baldia, District Kemari where waste from around 12,000 households will be segregated. Nighat’s home is one of households mobilised under an awareness campaign for waste segregation in order to turn the waste into green products. 

Nighat said, ‘After being sensitised by the Tearfund team, I realised and started segregating kitchen waste and other waste separately. Before being sensitised, we used to dump all the waste dry or wet into one waste bin. Now that we know better, we are using separate waste bins for kitchen waste and dry waste.’

She further said that most of the people used to dump waste on the streets, but now they are handing it over to the Hangzhou team (a contracting company of waste collection with the Sindh Solid Waste Management Board) on a daily basis. 

The Tearfund UKAM team organised household awareness sessions on waste segregation with family members and also held some community consultative meetings to identify volunteers and influentials in the area where Nighat resides. During one such meeting the Tearfund team identified three potential female volunteers from the same street to support in mobilising people.  

Nighat said that there were 20 households on her street. Around nine households started segregating waste in July 2021, and delivered it to the waste collectors. She has personally visited households to raise awareness and sensitise community members to segregate waste.