Kenya’s Dandora Municipal Dump Site is the only dumping location for waste in Nairobi, East Africa’s most populous city, and serves as a provocative starting point for understanding the growing health, poverty, and sanitation problems facing the rapidly expanding capital and region.

Located just 8 km from the central business district, the 30-acre Dandora site literally spills into the households of nearly one million people living in nearby slums. While the landfill itself had occasionally appeared in news coverage, this project was among the first long-form documentary efforts to move beyond the dump and examine the lives of the communities living in its shadow. Through months of immersive reporting, it explored what proximity to Dandora has meant for the health, dignity, spirit, and landscape of the surrounding neighborhoods, uncovering the neglected voices of people whose livelihoods are shaped by the landfill each day. Behind the statistics of children with respiratory ailments, toxic blood lead levels, skin disorders, and fatal diseases directly attributed to the waste are stories of communities that have come to depend on the dump, from street children who survive by selling food and other items recovered from its piles to residents paid pennies a day by private cartels to sort and recycle waste.

The country’s leadership has long shown alarming indifference to Dandora, ignoring environmental laws, UN-commissioned health studies, and calls for closure from human rights groups. A contested February 2012 process to decommission the site was ultimately canceled. Through a narrative of survival amid profound health and environmental consequences, this project reveals a marginalized population that had remained largely invisible despite living at the edge of one of Africa’s fastest growing cities.