By Isaac Njuguna
March 2026, Nairobi.
March usually marks the onset of Kenya’s long rainy season, but the rains are progressively arriving with deeply damaging force. Now, one of the biggest cities in Sub-Saharan Africa stands defaced by another heavy downpour, the heaviest since 2024. The picture is a complete eyesore: damaged critical infrastructure, overwhelmed city drainage systems, flooded highways and arterials, and mobility severely impaired for both pedestrians and motorists.
In recent years, such scenes have become all too familiar across Kenya’s capital. Behind them are cross-cutting impacts: loss of lives, livelihoods, disrupted businesses, and growing economic losses. The flash floods have so far claimed 23 lives in the city, out of 49 recorded nationally, and displaced over 4,800 households, according to the Kenya Red Cross. As experts take stock of the current damage, previous estimates from the 2024 flooding put the cost of repairing road infrastructure alone at $300 million. The burden falls hardest on the urban poor. Many Nairobi residents live in informal settlements along riverbanks and floodplains, areas with little protection when the water rises. In many ways, Nairobi is a city that has outpaced its own infrastructure.
The city’s population now exceeds five million people (Nairobi County Annual Development Plan, 2025), placing immense pressure on drainage systems, roads, housing and public services. Much of the city’s infrastructure was built decades ago, designed for a much smaller population and a different climate regime. Today, blocked drainage, uncontrolled urban expansion, and settlements and informal businesses within riparian zones all contribute to the severity of the city’s flooding. When the rains come, as they often do, the city ceases to function optimally.
Although national and county governments have made efforts to strengthen disaster risk management and emergency response systems, much of this remains reactive. The underlying vulnerabilities remain largely unaddressed. The question therefore arises: is the current level of investment in disaster risk management sufficient for a city of Nairobi’s scale and complexity?
The solutions to Nairobi’s vulnerabilities require more than short-term and reactive measures. It needs systemic investment in urban resilience, which may include modernising stormwater and drainage infrastructure, restoring riparian buffers and floodplains, improving land use and zoning enforcement, investing in climate-resilient transport and energy systems, and strengthening early warning and disaster preparedness mechanisms. However, implementing these solutions need substantial financial resources. Although cities recognise the urgency of climate adaptation, securing finance remains difficult. International climate funds, development banks, and private investors offer support, but success hinges on well-designed, bankable proposals.
For many cities, this gap remains unresolved. Securing funding for disaster risk management and climate adaptation has become one of the most pressing challenges confronting rapidly growing cities in the Global South. City governments must work through complex financing landscapes that involve national budgets, multilateral development banks, international climate funds, and private capital. Building investment pipelines that align with these mechanisms calls for technical expertise, sound governance, and careful project preparation.
It is in this space that E Co. has been supporting city governments in translating climate risks into investable opportunities, helping them shift from reactive disaster response toward long-term resilience by developing strong investment pipelines for adaptation and disaster risk management, from flood mitigation infrastructure to climate-resilient urban mobility systems.
Our approach is already being applied in several contexts and countries. In Morocco, E Co. has worked with subnational governments to develop bankable climate projects in water, energy and waste management while strengthening city governments’ capacities in climate finance and project pipeline development and monitoring. In Zambia, E Co. has collaborated with the government, the African Development Bank and the NDC Partnership to support the development of bankable project pipelines in low-carbon urban mobility, urban waste-to-energy systems, and sustainable water management. Meanwhile, in Osh City, Kyrgyzstan, E Co. is leading the formulation of the Green City Action Plan, which will outline strategic long-term and short-term action plans supported by a pipeline of bankable projects that strengthen the city’s climate resilience.
Through these projects, E Co. consistently shows how cities can turn climate risks into tangible investment opportunities. This approach holds particular promise for rapidly expanding urban centres like Nairobi. Still the big question persists: Can Nairobi mobilise the finance needed to build resilience before the next floods arrive?
