Where It All Began

To understand Zuripacks, you have to understand where it began, not in a lab or a startup incubator, but in the heart of Kibera, Africa’s largest urban informal settlement and a home to 1.5 million people.

Growing up in Kibera meant learning to navigate a world where innovation and hardship coexisted in every corner. It meant living in a place full of spirit, strength, and community, but also a place overwhelmed by waste, particularly plastic.

Living in Plastic, Surrounded by Pollution

In Kibera, plastic was everywhere. It was the default material for packaging, shopping and even waste disposal. And without any formal waste collection system, the same plastic we used daily often ended up in our backyards, waterways and even food chains. I witnessed firsthand how the absence of proper waste management infrastructure, combined with heavy dependence on single-use plastics, turned our communities into dumping grounds, stealing dignity from both the land and the people.

Seeing The Bigger Picture

We also saw something else: resilience, ingenuity and untapped potential.

As we later began working with grassroots communities, one question kept following us:

How could we reimagine the packaging industry in a way that restored the environment and created opportunities for people like those we grew up with?

By continuing to become more intentional about creating a viable solution, we began to see the patterns more clearly.

We saw youth bursting with potential, yet left behind by a lack of opportunity.
We saw women hustling through informal work, resilient but underpaid and overlooked.
We saw banana farmers producing tonnes of banana crop waste, unaware that what they were discarding could hold hidden value.
And we saw communities continue to deal with the visible weight of plastic pollution, but excluded from global conversations about climate solutions.

That’s how Zuripacks was born, as a response to two urgent needs: the need to eliminate single-use plastic packaging and the need to empower underserved communities with sustainable livelihoods.

Today, every Zuripacks product is a symbol of where we’ve come from and where we’re going: a cleaner planet, thriving communities and a world where no one is left behind in the fight against plastic pollution.