2026 Young Professional Award

Gary Baker, IAIA CEO: Hello, again. I’m Gary Baker, and we’re here to see and hear a little bit more about one of our award winners for 2026. I’m joined today by Oscar Obonyo, who is the recipient of the Young Professional Award for 2026.

Many congratulations, Oscar, and welcome to this little video. We’re here to just hear and understand a little bit more about the background to your career so far and how you’ve ended up sitting here as a recipient of the Young Professional Award. So perhaps you can share how you’ve got into the areas that you’re now involved, and then we can talk a little bit more about EIA and impact assessment within Kenya, as well. But tell us more about your background, please.

Oscar Obonyo, Award Winner: All right, so thank you, Gary, for having me. I must say I’m also excited and very delighted having been chosen to be the recipient of the Young Professional Awards for 2026. I must admit I did not see this coming. But yeah, all in good steps. So as I said, I’m Oscar Obonyo, and I’m an ESG and sustainability expert, but I’m professionally trained in integrated environmental impact assessments and audit. That’s a profession I’ve been for close to a decade now. My career has sort of spanned through diverse sectors. I’ve been in wash sectors; I’ve been in waste management; of course, water infrastructure; civil infrastructure, including roads; energy. I’ve also worked in renewable energy across East Africa. And then in fast moving consumer goods setup, I’ve been practicing in the manufacturing sector, and as of very recently then in the retail. So it’s a field that I have grown to quite learn from experience.

The world is fast changing, so there is always something new you’re going to pick up from different sectors — how different sectors approach issues to do with environmental and social safeguards, how to make sure that projects, infrastructures, and communities remain resilient to climate change and the changing times. So, yeah, it has been quite an experience going through all those.

Gary: And has that all been based in Kenya? You mentioned East Africa — the sort of projects you get involved in, are they national level or regional? Tell us more about that.

Oscar: I have done a number of national and regional projects. Regional ones were largely based on international government corporations. I’ve done projects that are based on renewable energy across Uganda and Tanzania under the Africa Renewable Energy Fund. I’ve done some along the Kenyan pipeline, which required a cooperation of all East African countries of coal, of course the Kenya Petroleum Technical Assistance Project, the Labset Projects. So it’s a variety of projects, some that require international cooperation among its markets and governments, but a majority of them have been donor funded, so especially infrastructure projects that are funded under the World Bank and the African Development Bank.

Gary: It’s a broad question, but how would you rate where environmental legislation and sustainability are in Kenya and East Africa now? Are you still seeing positive momentum and improvement, or where is that?

Oscar: I think we have come quite a long way. I’d speak specifically for Kenya in terms of development of legislation around environmental and ecosystem issues around communities, especially with respect to free prior and informed consent, public participation, access to resources and benefit sharing. And this has broadly translated towards a development of even newer regulations that are surrounding the ESG and sustainability space. So Kenya has visibly been trying to position itself as a champion for ESG in Africa. And I think the legislative pathway has taken precedence and right now organizations and communities at large are beginning to embrace that trajectory. Of course, it’s still a learning curve. I would not find it as steep as it was perhaps 10 years ago. So there’s quite some hope in the future for it.

As for East Africa, yes, they are also on the same trajectory. You can see countries like Rwanda with regulations on the ban of single use plastics. And you find that even if you’re doing cross border trade, you find that you cannot take products into specific countries that have enforced such kinds of bans. So you find that as much as you’re enforcing local regulations, of course you have to be alive to the fact that multilateral collaborations also require you to exercise best practice at home so that you are not exporting bad behavior across borders.

Gary: Yeah. And one of the things that is acknowledged in your award citation is this  triple zero, or chasing triple zero, initiative. Can you tell us more a little bit about that please?

Oscar: Alright, so to better understand Chasing Zero — Chasing Zero was set up in the manufacturing sector. And it had three targets. Number one, to realize zero waste across production processes and the value chain. Number two is to again realize zero harm again across business operations, all the way to the consumership. And number three was to curtail emissions so that we are able to set great targets to achieve net zero.

So the Chasing Zero initiative was structured under two primary SDGs. That was SDG 12, responsible production and consumption, because it is the production and consumption patterns that lead to a variety of challenges that we are experiencing today, including the triple planetary crisis. And then SDG 17, which is also alive to the fact that if you are a business and you want to achieve a certain impact, sometimes it might not be possible — or you might not achieve it to the level that you want to — if you are chasing your primary business targets. That means that you have to collaborate across sectors with innovators, with communities, societies, regulators in order to make sure that you can achieve these impacts as optimally as possible.

So when chasing zero was birthed in the manufacturing setup, there was the first realization that during the production process, there is a lot of waste, and a lot of that waste happened to be plastic waste. So the first understanding was that there is a way in which we can get product without having so much that is taken out of the factory to other places. Sometimes traceability might be a challenge. Therefore, let’s bear the first responsibility of managing this waste at in-house level.

So the first approach towards affecting that was to obtain grinders of which the plastic waste that was deemed recyclable would be fed to these grinders, so instead of becoming waste it would be channeled into more usable raw material. So because plastic packaging was being generated at that particular level, we managed to have at least 21% of the primary packaging that was coming from the factory constituting of that recycled material. That means that 21% of the plastic that is churned out of course is recovered as waste and there’s also savings for that 21% that you don’t have to now start importing that polymer to cover up for those losses.

And then there’s those wastes that cannot feasibly or practically be recycled at in-house level. And we painstakingly sought a partnership on how this could be properly managed for the environment. We came across an innovator — of course, he was at the last stages of designing a process for conversion of plastics and biomass into what we are calling the ecofuel. So this ecofuel comes in a form of diesel and petrol, and he’s also now innovating around LPG. But we found that to be a solution — an alternative energy solution — as opposed to the purchase of conventional fossil diesel. So in a manufacturing setup, of course, there’s generators, there’s boilers, there’s vehicles, the fleet, and all these need to consume that particular fossil fuel. So if there’s an alternative provision of using this eco-fuel that is generated from biomass waste and plastic waste and it gives you the same performance as what you would get from fossil fuel with fewer emissions, then that was what we considered as the first alternative to it.

When you’re looking at the zero waste, of course, there was the issue of product getting to the consumer level, and then once the consumer depletes it, there is really no cutting edge mechanism to monitor how waste comes from the consumer and then probably lands in a responsible way that it can be recycled. So a lot of it ends up in the landfill. And as part of extended producer responsibility now, we did take it upon ourselves to make sure that we’re setting up initiatives now under zero waste to make sure that waste can be taken back from the consumer. And then they are incentivized here, so that they can bring it to market, to the outlets, so that we are again able to recover it and then channel it back into the recycling process.

Gary: It’s often the case — I have these conversations with a lot of people — people can identify where there are problems in the supply chain, wherever it might be — production, transport, consumption. But it’s often the case, I think, that it takes entrepreneurs to really come up with those small ideas that are then scalable to try and find solutions. And I often find that — you know, I’ve done work in Kenya and East Africa — that there are a lot of these people sort of hovering around and finding ways in which increased efficiency can be found in all sorts of processes, but it does take an awful lot of effort at micro levels to then be able to scale to larger size.

Oscar: Absolutely. And if you can look at the context of Kenya, the ecosystem for waste pickers and waste recyclers is actually huge, and it’s growing by the day. And you find that they have even developed tech along that space to help you just see the amount of waste that is landing in the landfills, how much of it is being recovered, how much of it is being recycled. So the essence of partnership is just to realize that as a business this ecosystem exists, and therefore what quantum of your business are you willing to set aside to finance such initiatives so that you have other people in the ecosystem helping you to remedy this problem. So there’s a lot of business buying that takes in because it also requires some capital investment in it.

Gary: I’m very interested — maybe a final question, because I appreciate time is pushing — but it seems like your career has taken you to a very interesting intersection of industry and sustainability — yes, impact assessment sits very central to that, but you’re in an interesting sort of blended situation there, it seems.

Oscar: Absolutely, because I would say primarily looking at issues of environmental and social safeguards, and then on the other hand looking at issues of environmental, social and corporate governance, there is quite an intersection somewhere. But then the slight difference comes into are we undertaking these activities and initiatives to remain compliant to maybe our local ordinances or national regulations, or are we doing it for best practice to achieve a certain impact that is going to drive a certain change? That intersection is basically there, but I have found myself leaning more towards the impact side as opposed to the compliance side of it.

Gary: I think that’s a very strong message to impact assessors generally — we deal with impact. We’re trying to deal with impact, not just with ticking a box and getting a permit granted. Thank you very much for your contribution and explanation as to what you’re involved with. Maybe a final question would be, this is the Young Professional Award, so what would be a message that you would give to even younger professionals coming into the industry? Is there something that you would say to them to give them hope or drive or whatever else?

Oscar: First I’d let them know that I know different countries and different continents are moving at different wavelengths when it comes to issues of impact assessment and just impact creation altogether. And I’d say there’s still an opportunity in this space because as much as we can see all the good work that is being done by some governments, by some industries, we can still look at global data on change, on climate, on the issues of waste — we are still not moving at the rate at which we should be moving. So for young professionals who are getting into this space, you might be tempted as every young person is tempted to want to focus on how am I generating revenue or how am I creating revenue? But if we just put a fraction of our professional and personal lives committed towards pursuing impact towards our planet and also towards our people, you’ll find that you end up creating a whole host of empowered communities that are going to drive the change that we are looking to have in future scientific conversations so that we can see that the curve is moving. So it has to be very deliberate.

Gary: That’s a very good message to end on. Oscar, thank you very much for your time today and very best of luck in your continuing career.

Oscar: Thank you, Gary. It was a pleasure.