Fadeel Notta was still in his early teens when he first noticed something that most people walk past without a second thought: neighbours struggling to breathe, air thick with the smell of burning and rotting refuse.
For a long time, the 17-year-old Aga Khan Academy Mombasa student says he didn’t know what to do about it. He just knew somebody had to. That somebody turned out to be him.
A robot, an incubator, and a wake-up call
Fadeel’s environmental journey didn’t begin with an award. It began with a garbage-collection robot.
The invention won him the Best Innovative Project Award from the Ministry of Education at the Kenya National Science and Engineering Fair, a national recognition that opened an unexpected door: a place in the I Choose Life Africa incubator programme.
It was there, working alongside communities in Kibera, one of Africa’s largest urban informal settlements, that Fadeel’s thinking shifted.
He observed a quiet but consequential flaw in the system. Residents were often encouraged to sort their waste at the source, only for collection trucks to mix it all back together before disposal.
Organic waste would contaminate plastic, paper, and metal, stripping recyclables of their value and making recovery far harder than it needed to be.
That single observation reframed the problem for him. Waste segregation, he realised, wasn’t just an environmental habit, it was an economic one.
Every waste stream, handled correctly, has value. Handled carelessly, that value disappears.
Building BinMan, then EarthPulse
Out of that insight came BinMan, an AI-enabled platform designed to connect households, businesses, recyclers, and community organisations, routing waste toward its highest-value use instead of the nearest landfill.
Built as his personal project, the app has already helped facilitate the recycling of more than 11,500 kg of waste across Kenya.
But Fadeel understood that technology alone doesn’t change behaviour, people do. So, he launched EarthPulse (Waste to Worth), the community-facing arm of BinMan, built to show people, tangibly, what segregation makes possible.
Working with 12 fellow students, Fadeel mobilised more than 80 peers across disciplines and grade levels into a school-based waste segregation and recycling programme.
The team didn’t stop at awareness campaigns. They went further, conducting the first documented waste-generation study of its kind in the area, surveying 50 households to map patterns that could inform long-term sustainability planning, both within the school community and beyond it.
“We wanted to take some action for the planet,” Fadeel says, tracing his motivation partly to remarks by former President Uhuru Kenyatta at a United Nations forum, where he argued that Africa needs smart, homegrown solutions.
“Growing up, I often saw people struggle to breathe, and realised the waste was making our own community sick. Those experiences made me realise that environmental challenges aren’t just about the planet. They directly affect people’s health and quality of life,” he adds.
From a school project to a global fund
That local groundwork has now earned international recognition. EarthPulse was selected for the International Baccalaureate Global Youth Action Fund (GYAF) 2026, chosen from more than 1,100 submissions spanning 42 countries, and awarded US$2,500 in funding.
Notably, it stands as the sole award-winning project from the entire Aga Khan Academies network this cycle.
It’s the latest in a string of honours for Fadeel, who has also distinguished himself academically, earning Honours at Aga Khan Academy Mombasa.
Following his participation in Global Encounters where he developed a pluralistic, globally-minded approach to problem-solving, he was selected as one of just 33 participants worldwide, out of more than 2,000 applicants, for the Global Citizens Initiative (GCI).
That achievement came with a full US$7,000 scholarship and travel grant to attend the GCI Summit in St Andrews, Scotland, where he sharpened his design-thinking skills and returned home with new frameworks for turning ideas into action.
He credits part of his drive to a broader sense of purpose.
“Prince Rahim Aga Khan V inspires me to act with purpose and speed to address climate change. I believe recycling from the source of waste production can transform Kenya's waste management sector,” he says.
What comes next
For Fadeel, EarthPulse and BinMan are not separate wins to be filed away. They’re two halves of the same long-term vision: a Kenya where organic and recyclable waste is treated as a resource rather than a burden, and where households, schools, businesses, and waste collectors share responsibility for getting it there.
The work speaks directly to three UN Sustainable Development Goals - SDG 11 (Sustainable Cities and Communities), SDG 12 (Responsible Consumption and Production), and SDG 13 (Climate Action) - and the team is already exploring how to adapt and replicate the EarthPulse model in other schools and communities.
“Climate change is a problem approaching us too quickly. Young people should be involved because they often bring the sharp and creative ideas needed to change this challenge in humanity’s favour,” Fadeel says.
At its core, waste management was never really the problem Fadeel set out to solve. What he’s building instead are the connections - between people, platforms, and purpose - that let waste become worth.
