OPINION
Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives
ANA LE ROCHA: The Power of Community Engagement and Empowerment
Ana Le Rocha, executive director of Nipe Fagio, a leading civil society organization in community engagement for solid waste management and policy advocacy in East Africa, describes waste management in Tanzania as a systemic problem requiring a systemic solution.
“Tanzania has a law that mandates waste segregation at-source. However, the reality is, in a city like Dar es Salaam which has a population of about 7 million, less than 40% of households have any sort of waste collection. The majority of households have no reason to segregate at-source because they know nobody is going to collect their waste,” she said.
Dar es Salaam, the largest city of Tanzania and in East Africa, produces over 5,600 tonnes¹ of waste each day. Only 40% of the city's waste is collected, and most of the collected waste is mixed and ends up in an unsanitary dump site. The rest is burned, buried, or dumped illegally, often clogging waterways, contaminating soil, and increasing urban air pollution. Most of the collected waste
doesn’t actually have to be disposed of in the dump as these could be reused, recycled, or composted.²
A United Nations report stated that “waste management is gradually becoming a serious concern in Tanzania due to limited sorting at-source and improper storage, collection, transportation, treatment and final disposal. The waste management problem is more pronounced in squatter settlements, where 70-80% of the urban population resides without the necessary infrastructure and social services.”³
Ana pointed out that the geography of urban squatter settlements poses a challenge. "It's not easy for garbage trucks to go to these areas. Also, low-income households cannot afford the waste collection fees collected by private companies," she said. She added that in rural Tanzania, there is rarely any kind of waste collection.
LEARNING FROM THE ZERO WASTE ACADEMY
Nipe Fagio is a Swahili phrase that literally translates to “give me the broom”. The symbolic phrase represents the organization’s mission to empower society with knowledge to create habits,
¹https://www.nipefagio.co.tz/categories/zero-waste/
²https://www.nipefagio.co.tz/categories/zero-waste/
³https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/content/documents/dsd/dsd_aofw_ni/ni_pdfs/NationalReports/tanzania/waste.pdf
customs and activities geared toward an ethic of self-responsibility for the creation of a clean and
healthy community.
When Ana joined Nipe Fagio in 2017, one of her main goals was to come up with a strategy to develop a systemic solution to Tanzania's systemic waste management problem.
“I was very eager to learn from other people who were implementing solutions that could be systemic and scaled up, and provide people with options,” said the Brazilian national who has a
Master’s degree in business focusing on business strategy for sustainability and marketing. In 2018, through the GAIA Network, she heard about the Zero Waste Academy (ZWA). Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, the ZWA was an immersive 2-week in-person workshop aimed at capacitating members and other stakeholders on how to implement a Zero Waste program in their respective cities and communities. As of writing, it is currently being implemented as a blended course — part online, part in-person. “I applied immediately because it was a great opportunity to learn about what's being done by participants from the Philippines and other countries, and shed light on what solutions we can develop in Tanzania,” she said.
Ana is among the 3rd batch of ZWA graduates, attending the ZWA held in Manila in 2018. “I learned a lot of useful information from the lectures, exercises and writing sessions, as well as from the
experiences shared by my co-participants. The most inspiring activity for me, the one that I really appreciated, was the community visit,” she said.
Together with the waste collectors from the local government, Ana and her ZWA batchmates went to several barangays (villages) in a flood-prone urban slum area to personally collect household waste. At the time, these barangays were only beginning to implement their community Zero Waste program. Ana remembers one resident who came out of their ramshackle shanty to hand over their household waste who was joined by a young child who approached the waste collectors and said, “Here's my diaper!” obviously a used one. “I could relate to that experience which is similar to our situation in Tanzania. I find it very powerful to go to people who are historically neglected and let them know that we care,” Ana said.
DECENTRALIZATION AND COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT
The way Nipe Fagio designed their community- based, cooperative-led Zero Waste model, Ana revealed, was inspired by what she learned from the ZWA. She recalls posting the module used in the Academy in their office in Dar es Salaam, the “10-Step Manual in Implementing a Community Zero Waste Program” developed by Mother Earth Foundation, a non-government organization that co-implemented and co-designed the ZWA with GAIA Asia Pacific.
“Every member of our implementation team had to learn the 10 steps. From our learnings in the Academy, we developed a decentralized system adapted to the realities in Tanzania and less reliant on the local government. It has been implemented in Dar es Salaam and Arusha since 2019,” Ana shared. The Nipe Fagio Zero Waste model enforces household-level, at-source waste segregation for four types of waste. Residents receive training and an orientation on at-source segregation of solid waste. They are also provided with supplies such as a bucket for organic waste and sacks for other kinds of waste. To facilitate model ownership, cooperatives are formed at the street level consisting of local waste pickers and community members, including women and youth. Members of the cooperatives conduct scheduled door-to-door segregated waste collection. Only segregated waste
is accepted and collected from the households.
The collected waste is brought to a local materials recovery facility (MRF) where organic waste — an average of 1.5 tonnes per day — is subjected to different types of composting, such as the use
of black soldier flies to produce chicken feed. All recyclables are further segregated and stored until an appropriate amount is accumulated for collection by a local recycling company. Residual
waste is likewise stored prior to disposal in a dumpsite in Dar es Salaam and a landfill in Arusha.
Nipe Fagio works in 17 regions of Tanzania, and currently has operations in Dar es Salaam and Arusha. The organization is looking to expand its work to port cities of Mwanza and Zanzibar in 2023.
Ana shared that most people do not have much confidence in low-income households in Tanzania to be able to do waste segregation at-source. “After my ZWA experience in the Philippines, we decided to go ahead and give our host communities a chance. Compliance turned out to be the easiest part of the program implementation,” she said.
The Nipe Fagio Zero Waste model has a remarkable 93% compliance rate for waste segregation at- source. “We are able to recover between 80% and 85% of all the collected household waste, and the rest are transported to the dumpsite and landfill. We recover about 90% of the collected organic waste,” Ana shared.
MAKING ZERO WASTE TANGIBLE
According to Ana, the ZWA gave her a vision of creating an integrated waste management model that deals with all kinds of solid waste in low-income neighborhoods. She believes that one of the Academy’s main roles is making the Zero Waste philosophy more accessible to participants. “If Zero Waste is tangible to the implementers, then it becomes tangible to the beneficiaries.
Consequently, host communities develop a sense of pride in being part of the Zero Waste work,” she said.
Ana is open to revisiting the ZWA and taking a new, more intensive course. “You never know enough; you can always learn more. Participating in the Academy also gives me the opportunity to share what we are doing in Tanzania with other Zero Waste advocates from other countries while learning from their experiences as well,” she said.
“Tanzania has a law that mandates waste segregation at-source. However, the reality is, in a city like Dar es Salaam which has a population of about 7 million, less than 40% of households have any sort of waste collection. The majority of households have no reason to segregate at-source because they know nobody is going to collect their waste,” she said.
Dar es Salaam, the largest city of Tanzania and in East Africa, produces over 5,600 tonnes¹ of waste each day. Only 40% of the city's waste is collected, and most of the collected waste is mixed and ends up in an unsanitary dump site. The rest is burned, buried, or dumped illegally, often clogging waterways, contaminating soil, and increasing urban air pollution. Most of the collected waste
doesn’t actually have to be disposed of in the dump as these could be reused, recycled, or composted.²
A United Nations report stated that “waste management is gradually becoming a serious concern in Tanzania due to limited sorting at-source and improper storage, collection, transportation, treatment and final disposal. The waste management problem is more pronounced in squatter settlements, where 70-80% of the urban population resides without the necessary infrastructure and social services.”³
Ana pointed out that the geography of urban squatter settlements poses a challenge. "It's not easy for garbage trucks to go to these areas. Also, low-income households cannot afford the waste collection fees collected by private companies," she said. She added that in rural Tanzania, there is rarely any kind of waste collection.
LEARNING FROM THE ZERO WASTE ACADEMY
Nipe Fagio is a Swahili phrase that literally translates to “give me the broom”. The symbolic phrase represents the organization’s mission to empower society with knowledge to create habits,
¹https://www.nipefagio.co.tz/categories/zero-waste/
²https://www.nipefagio.co.tz/categories/zero-waste/
³https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/content/documents/dsd/dsd_aofw_ni/ni_pdfs/NationalReports/tanzania/waste.pdf
customs and activities geared toward an ethic of self-responsibility for the creation of a clean and
healthy community.
When Ana joined Nipe Fagio in 2017, one of her main goals was to come up with a strategy to develop a systemic solution to Tanzania's systemic waste management problem.
“I was very eager to learn from other people who were implementing solutions that could be systemic and scaled up, and provide people with options,” said the Brazilian national who has a
Master’s degree in business focusing on business strategy for sustainability and marketing. In 2018, through the GAIA Network, she heard about the Zero Waste Academy (ZWA). Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, the ZWA was an immersive 2-week in-person workshop aimed at capacitating members and other stakeholders on how to implement a Zero Waste program in their respective cities and communities. As of writing, it is currently being implemented as a blended course — part online, part in-person. “I applied immediately because it was a great opportunity to learn about what's being done by participants from the Philippines and other countries, and shed light on what solutions we can develop in Tanzania,” she said.
Ana is among the 3rd batch of ZWA graduates, attending the ZWA held in Manila in 2018. “I learned a lot of useful information from the lectures, exercises and writing sessions, as well as from the
experiences shared by my co-participants. The most inspiring activity for me, the one that I really appreciated, was the community visit,” she said.
Together with the waste collectors from the local government, Ana and her ZWA batchmates went to several barangays (villages) in a flood-prone urban slum area to personally collect household waste. At the time, these barangays were only beginning to implement their community Zero Waste program. Ana remembers one resident who came out of their ramshackle shanty to hand over their household waste who was joined by a young child who approached the waste collectors and said, “Here's my diaper!” obviously a used one. “I could relate to that experience which is similar to our situation in Tanzania. I find it very powerful to go to people who are historically neglected and let them know that we care,” Ana said.
DECENTRALIZATION AND COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT
The way Nipe Fagio designed their community- based, cooperative-led Zero Waste model, Ana revealed, was inspired by what she learned from the ZWA. She recalls posting the module used in the Academy in their office in Dar es Salaam, the “10-Step Manual in Implementing a Community Zero Waste Program” developed by Mother Earth Foundation, a non-government organization that co-implemented and co-designed the ZWA with GAIA Asia Pacific.
“Every member of our implementation team had to learn the 10 steps. From our learnings in the Academy, we developed a decentralized system adapted to the realities in Tanzania and less reliant on the local government. It has been implemented in Dar es Salaam and Arusha since 2019,” Ana shared. The Nipe Fagio Zero Waste model enforces household-level, at-source waste segregation for four types of waste. Residents receive training and an orientation on at-source segregation of solid waste. They are also provided with supplies such as a bucket for organic waste and sacks for other kinds of waste. To facilitate model ownership, cooperatives are formed at the street level consisting of local waste pickers and community members, including women and youth. Members of the cooperatives conduct scheduled door-to-door segregated waste collection. Only segregated waste
is accepted and collected from the households.
The collected waste is brought to a local materials recovery facility (MRF) where organic waste — an average of 1.5 tonnes per day — is subjected to different types of composting, such as the use
of black soldier flies to produce chicken feed. All recyclables are further segregated and stored until an appropriate amount is accumulated for collection by a local recycling company. Residual
waste is likewise stored prior to disposal in a dumpsite in Dar es Salaam and a landfill in Arusha.
Nipe Fagio works in 17 regions of Tanzania, and currently has operations in Dar es Salaam and Arusha. The organization is looking to expand its work to port cities of Mwanza and Zanzibar in 2023.
Ana shared that most people do not have much confidence in low-income households in Tanzania to be able to do waste segregation at-source. “After my ZWA experience in the Philippines, we decided to go ahead and give our host communities a chance. Compliance turned out to be the easiest part of the program implementation,” she said.
The Nipe Fagio Zero Waste model has a remarkable 93% compliance rate for waste segregation at- source. “We are able to recover between 80% and 85% of all the collected household waste, and the rest are transported to the dumpsite and landfill. We recover about 90% of the collected organic waste,” Ana shared.
MAKING ZERO WASTE TANGIBLE
According to Ana, the ZWA gave her a vision of creating an integrated waste management model that deals with all kinds of solid waste in low-income neighborhoods. She believes that one of the Academy’s main roles is making the Zero Waste philosophy more accessible to participants. “If Zero Waste is tangible to the implementers, then it becomes tangible to the beneficiaries.
Consequently, host communities develop a sense of pride in being part of the Zero Waste work,” she said.
Ana is open to revisiting the ZWA and taking a new, more intensive course. “You never know enough; you can always learn more. Participating in the Academy also gives me the opportunity to share what we are doing in Tanzania with other Zero Waste advocates from other countries while learning from their experiences as well,” she said.
Mar 1, 2023
