Magreth Ndoro, the unsung heroine cleaning Mt Kilimanjaro and parks

By Anganile Mwakyanjala

Enormous efforts have been put into marketing Tanzania’s tourism to the world, and indeed, it is paying off with millions of tourists flocking to the country, with 2023 recording the highest number of tourists to visit Tanzania.

The migration of people naturally changes the landscape of a place, and with Mt Kilimanjaro being the highest mountain in Africa and the desire to conquer it irresistible, many tourists make the attempt to climb it, which comes with littering, from water and food consumed to maintain the energy to summit it.

Ms Magreth Ndoro, an environmental activist and freelance tour guide, has for more than a decade been at the forefront of protecting the Mt Kilimanjaro environment and Mikumi National Park has seen the effort firsthand as the first woman to join the team of environment cleaners in Kilomanjaro more than a decade ago.

Her love for tourism was greatly influenced by her father, who was a tour guide and the founder of the trails going to Ndoro Waterfalls.

She would always follow him behind as he was leading the European tourists, which was adventurous for her as she fell in love with the English language early on and started learning it.

Her mother, who worked at a hotel, would also teach her to master the English language, which later became a major tool in communicating with her clients.

As a student at the National College of Tourism, she had a desire to climb Mt Kilimanjaro and kicked in a favour when she was offered a position as a field attachment student where she would learn in practice.

“At Kilimanjaro, they had an initiative to collect trash from Marangu Point to Uhuru Peak,” she remembers. “We would climb to the top of the mountain, clean it, and descend, picking litter too; it had to be spotless,” she said.

The mountain is littered with a lot of plastic and tissue paper, back in the days when she started off cleaning in 2013. “We used to collect a lot of trash,” she said.

Her college had a “roots and shoots” programme of which she was the chairwoman; the programme entailed cleaning other institutions of public importance like hospitals.

“I always had a passion for the environment,” she said. Magreth would later apply her passion and experience cleaning the slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro to cleaning the environment around the waterfalls in Morogoro, located 20 kilometres from Mikumi National Park.

The area is covered with beautiful mountains and splendid waterfalls, a magnet for tourists but also a victim to massive littering, from soda cans to plastic water bottles.

They have seen it all being dumped there, but another environmental disaster is poised by farmers, who Magreth and other environmental activities educated them to do farming close to the water sources and the dangers of it.

One of the incentive programmes they had for the communities around the waterfalls was for them to receive a percentage of the fees the tourists paid, which made them more involved in protecting their environment. “When we started, the trails were not so clean, but now the villagers do clean themselves, for they have seen that a cleaner environment is also beneficial for them,” she added.

Cleaning the environment at the waterfalls posed a different challenge from when she was cleaning Mt Kilimanjaro, where it was cold and slippery when it rained and harder to clean. She would spend ten days collecting litter for the summit. Ms Magreth was the only female on the Kilimanjaro cleaning team, and she faced discouragement from one of the members of the team.

“He said I am a woman and would not make it to the summit, but it turned out he is the only one who didn’t make it; he had to turn back; he wasn’t tough enough,” she remembers laughing at the past incident.

Tanzania’s quest to be a dominant tourist destination is admirable and vital to our economy, and the environmental impact is inevitably addressed.

 “All the national parks and tourist spots should have enough trash bins and ways of getting rid of the trash in time before birds and animals get to them and trash around again,“ she said.

Ms Magreth moved to Mikumi in 2017, where she also serves as a freelance tour guide, taking visitors hiking in the mountains and visiting the five waterfalls, the biggest and most popular being the Chizua waterfalls.

She recently took students to Mikumi National Park to serve as their tour guide, a two-day adventure.  Ms Magreth chooses to be a freelance guide because she is not restricted to any tour company and it brings her more money; she doesn’t have to wait for the end-of-month salary.

The only requirement is to be very professional and make sure that the client has the best time. “The tour companies that hire me to take their clients would always ask them after a trip how well I did, and based on that, they could choose to hire me again,” she said.

Ms Magreth, a mother to two children has been doing an incredible job and is thankful clients have been coming back to use her as a tour guide, but she has not forgotten her environmental activism to preserve and protect Tanzania’s tourist attractions.