Derreck Kayongo Saw Value in the Soap Hotels Threw Away

Derreck Kayongo grew up in Uganda during the last years of Idi Amin's dictatorship. As a child he saw violence in the streets, and his father, Thomas, was kidnapped and later released. His mother and sisters fled to Kenya, and Derreck followed. The family lived as refugees in Kenya.

In Kenya, soap was hard to get. Kayongo has described how scarce it was, and how his father, who had learned soapmaking, made soap at home from lye, dye, and perfume, working on the kitchen floor while worried the government would find out.

At 22, Kayongo came to the United States for graduate school. His first stay was in a hotel in Philadelphia. He noticed that the bathroom soap was replaced every day, even when the bar had barely been used. The used bars, he learned, were simply thrown away.

Kayongo has said he called his father about it, wondering why the partially used bars could not be recycled into new ones and sent where people could not afford soap.

The idea did not turn into an organization right away. Kayongo built a career in human rights and humanitarian work, with jobs at Amnesty International, the American Friends Service Committee, and CARE in Atlanta. He became a U.S. citizen in 2005.

In 2008, on a visit to Uganda, his father pressed him on what he was really doing with his life. Accounts of his life tie the founding of the Global Soap Project to that conversation.

In 2009 he and his wife, Sarah, started the Global Soap Project in Atlanta. The first operation ran out of the family's basement and turned out roughly 500 bars a week. The idea was simple to describe and harder to do: collect partially used soap from hotels, clean and reprocess it into new bars, and send it to places where people could not afford soap.

Volunteers, hotels, and donors made it possible. The first delivery, about 5,000 bars, went to Kenya in 2010, the same country where Kayongo had once lived as a refugee.

The process required more than good intentions. Collected bars had to be sorted and cleaned, and the reprocessed soap had to be safe to use. Kayongo has pointed out how much soap hotels discard, a figure he has put in the millions of bars every day worldwide, while in many places children still lack soap for basic handwashing.

In April 2015 Global Soap consolidated with Clean the World, a larger soap recycling nonprofit, and the work continued under the Clean the World name. Together the organizations reported that more than 23 million recycled bars had gone to 99 countries.

Kayongo was named one of CNN's Top 10 Heroes in 2011. He later served as CEO of the National Center for Civil and Human Rights in Atlanta, and in January 2025 Clean Production Action named him its executive director. The project that started with a hotel bar of soap kept growing after he moved on, carried by partners who took it further.