Nalubaaga valley cooperative: from waste to regeneration

In 2023, during a regenerative design course, we were asked to imagine a place in a regenerative future state. What I saw in my mind was vivid: Nalubaaga wetland and her people in beautiful reciprocal relation — the wetland nourishing people, people nourishing the wetland. It was so alive that I couldn't let it pass. So we started convening residents, landowners, and listening to the land and culture.

Two years of listening have grounded that image into an insight: the climate crisis is not about carbon — it is a symptom of broken relations between humans and nature, between communities and their ecosystems. The regenerative imperative is not to capture more carbon but to restore these broken relations, one at a time.

In Kiwaatule, Kampala, one broken relation is visible every morning. Nalubaaga — a wetland valley whose springs once fed five districts — now chokes on waste. A century of colonial land fragmentation turned her 530-acre catchment into thousands of individually fenced plots, leaving each landowner facing her decline alone.

Together with residents, we formed the Nalubaaga Valley Community Cooperative, with the wetland as a formal shareholder. On 6 April 2026, 27 landstewards made their first collective land decision in over a century. They chose to begin with the Residents ⇋ Waste relation — the wound people touch with their own hands every morning.

Over the next six months, we are running a community-led governance cycle: residents, elders, youth, informal waste collectors, and Nalubaaga's own ecological intelligence reshaping together materials flows through this place. By year's end: community-designed composting and waste-to-value enterprises running on cooperatively held land, and wetland buffer zones under collective stewardship for the first time.

What is unique about our work is that Nalubaaga is not the object of this work — she is a participant in it - participating alongside landstewards in quadratic decision-making on what gets done here.