The court ordered the government to clean up Owino Uhuru, a village on the outskirts of Mombasa, within four months and gave the relevant agencies 90 days to pay out the compensation money.
Omido told CNN that Thursday’s ruling is a validation of her and the village resident’s resolve to receive justice.
“Many people did not believe me and kept telling me what I was saying about lead poisoning was made up, but now the court has seen the community was exposed to this danger,” Omido said.
Long road to victory
Omido worked at the lead-acid battery recycling plant, Metal Refinery EPZ, as a community relations manager in 2009.
She quit after three months when her baby became sick and doctors found lead in her son’s blood test they said he might have ingested from her breast milk.
“My son was sick but I was also not feeling good. Our eyes at the factory would be watering and the smell from the factory was pungent. It got me thinking about what they were producing there,” Omido told CNN.
“After I quit, I noticed that people in the environment had the same issues and decided to get people tested.”
The company shut down in 2014 eight years after it began operation nearby the village and only when Kenya made the exportation of scrap metal illegal.
Dozens of residents tested positive following a 2015 assessment by the government and in some tests conducted showed blood lead levels that were deemed dangerous by the Kenyan Centers for Disease Control.
Campaign against environmental abuses
The activist says there is more work to be done.
Omido said hundreds of children suspected to have been impacted by the presence of toxic smelters in the village are yet to be tested, according to her organization’s assessment.
“The most important thing now is to test all the children and ensure that those affected have access to medication all of them on medication and to clean the environment so the community can live in a place that is safe for then,” she told CNN.
