Mathare Social Justice Centre (MSJC)

The Mathare Social Justice Centre emerged in 2014 when young community activists in Mathare—one of Nairobi’s largest informal settlements, home to roughly half a million people—came together to envision a space for more participatory forms of justice. For years, residents had endured structural violence with little recourse: land grabbing, forced evictions, police abuse, extrajudicial killings, and political impunity. MSJC was built to change that through grassroots organizing and community-led human rights documentation.

The centre operates from the Kwa Macharia Building, a structure with its own history of resistance—it once served as a gathering place for freedom fighters during Kenya’s independence movement. That through-line from anti-colonial organizing to contemporary struggles against state violence is no accident.

The centre’s foundational campaign produced “Who is Next?”—a 2017 participatory action research report documenting over 800 Kenyans killed by police between 2013 and 2016. This work, conducted by community members rather than outside researchers, established MSJC’s methodology: affected people investigating their own conditions and building collective power from their findings. Subsequent campaigns have addressed water justice (Maji ni Haki), disability rights (Tuna Haki Pia!), reproductive justice, and the experiences of mothers and wives whose family members were killed by police.

MSJC operates as part of the Social Justice Centres Working Group, a horizontal network of approximately 30 grassroots centres working on human rights and social justice issues across Kenya’s informal settlements. This network—including centres in Githurai, Mukuru, Kayole, and Ngong—represents a distinctly Kenyan model of decentralized, community-controlled organizing that explicitly rejects the NGO-led development paradigm. As the centre states: no one should think or decide for the organized poor.

The centre hosts monthly community dialogues, organizes people’s assemblies bringing together residents across Mathare’s six wards, and runs the Matigari Book Club for political education. The Mathare Green Movement plants trees for “food, medicine, memory and healing,” connecting ecological justice to the daily struggles of informal settlement life. A Legal Empowerment Hub works to demystify legal processes and transform law into a tool for community defense. Youth safe spaces provide programming for children ages 6-17.

MSJC maintains international solidarity relationships, including with Papo Reto in Rio de Janeiro’s Complexo da Maré and connections to people’s assemblies in Italy, Britain, and Scotland. The centre has organized around Palestinian solidarity through the Kenya Palestine Solidarity Movement. In 2024, MSJC members were on the frontlines of protests against Kenya’s punitive Finance Bill, with staff detained for exercising their constitutional right to assembly.

The centre’s anti-capitalist analysis is explicit—their “Crises of Capitalism in Nairobi” project documents how economic systems produce the conditions residents face daily. But MSJC’s power comes from its rootedness: this is not theory imposed from outside but knowledge generated by people organizing where they live, at times suitable for them, in ways that include everyone.