As People of Action, our help and personal response is always needed. We want our community to be better than how we found it.
Where we are
The Rotary Club of Gachie is in Nairobi, Kenya. We are 16kms due west of the Central Business District. The area comprises the neighbourhoods of Gachie, Ruaka, Kihara Banana Hill, Ndumberi and Wangige areas to the west. Next to these villages are the affluent areas of Gigiri, Runda, RedHill and Muthaiga which house many diplomatic missions and residences, as well as the United National Environment Programme Headquarters. They also provide low level and mid-level employment for some of the other residents of this area.
This was predominantly a tea and coffee growing area 30 years ago, with established plantations and small- scale farming. When coffee prices plummeted in the 80’s, big coffee plantations thought it more profitable to subdivide their land and sell to developers looking to fill the accommodation vacuum created by rural to urban migrants into Nairobi looking for work. Small-scale farmers soon followed suit, subdividing their land parcels and selling to hungry developers, retaining a portion for their own residences. This is more evident in the new growing areas of Gachie, Banana Hill and Ruaka, which are now a sea of high-rise apartment towers offering accommodation to the thousands of workers in Nairobi City . The former reputation of some of these newly developed areas was not good. Gachie was particularly notorious for harbouring criminals who wrecked havoc in Nairobi in the past with bank robberies, burglary and other criminal activities. Karura forest nearby was known as a dump for dead bodies killed during the commission of a crime. Obviously, there are jokes about the name of our club due to that reputation!
Between the affluence of some of our community areas and the new developments reside a middle group who either through greed or mismanagement, have fallen into poverty. This is the group that RC Gachie wants to assist.
Who we are
The club was chartered on 16th May 2018 with 32 members and the club has managed to maintain this number. The membership is on average between the ages of 30 and 45, and is almost equal in numbers of male and female members. We meet every Monday evening at the Trade Mark Hotel within the Village Market in Gigiri. Due to Covid 19 restrictions, most of our meetings are on-line but attendance at project activities is physical, with observance of all Covid 19 protocols.
What we do
We continue to develop and implement activities in line with our Strategic Plan of 2021/2023. At the beginning of the strategy period, we made a club decision to focus on Peace & Conflict Resolution, the Environment, Education and Basic Literacy, Health and Disease Prevention, Water and Sanitation.
RC Gachie will continue on its path of offering voluntary financial and in-kind services to its community in answer to the ethos of Service Above Self. We are deliberately focused on carrying out as many community services within our capability during these trying times. As People of Action, our help and personal response is always needed. We want our community to be better than how we found it.