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COUNTRY PROFILE I GAMBIA
GAMBIA I COUNTRY PROFILE
Big waste issues
in little Gambia
Rubbish collection and sorting in Africa’s smallest nation is rudimentary to say the least, but measures are
being taken at home and from abroad to help the local population emerge from its quagmire. Louise Hunt
meets those on the front line of efforts to bring Gambia’s waste management into the 21st century
F
or many living in the urban sprawl
of the Gambia’s capital Banjul,
waste collection is a man with a
donkey and cart who is paid a small
weekly fee to trundle from house to house
with mountainous bundles of rubbish. Others
use one of the many truck services also run by
private collectors.
The district councils are meant to provide a
municipal waste management service, but
collection from designated points in the town
is at best irregular, and there are no formal
services in rural areas.
Bakary Jadama, environmental health and
sanitation manager for Brikama Area
Council in southern Gambia, says the lack of
public money available for waste
management is the main problem.
The service should be covered by residents’
rates, but there is always a shortfall.
The council has six refuse collection
vehicles to serve the country’s fastest-growing
municipality, which is home to 700,000
residents, 40% of the total population. “We do
not have adequate transport to deal with the
waste. The vehicles often break down.
Collection is supposed to be daily but can
often be a week or more,” Jadama says. One
A growing problem
Africa’s smallest country
The Gambia, 20 miles wide on either side of its
namesake river, is Africa’s smallest country
and one of its poorest, with many people
living on less than a dollar a day. It ranks 172
out of 195 countries in the United Nations
Human Development Index.
28 I June 2015 I www.recyclingwasteworld.co.uk
person said their waste had only ever been
collected twice by the council. So rubbish is
everywhere – discarded plastic bags carpet
the sandy streets and amass in ditches along
the roadside. What isn’t collected is burnt in
people’s compounds.
There is no official research on the public
health and environmental impacts of
mismanaged rubbish in the Gambia, says
Jadama, but he sees the effects on people’s
lives. “Respiratory tract infections, lead
poisoning, flooding when the waterways are
blocked that causes malaria and dysentery
outbreaks,” he says.
WasteAid UK consultant Mike Webster
Most of the waste that is collected is taken to a
vast unregulated dump in Bakoteh, situated in
the heart of the busiest urban area, Serekunda.
There is no leachate control or landfill gas
removal; waste is simply left to rot, or not, and
neighbouring communities are continuously
exposed to toxic smoke from the burning
rubbish, even visible on Google Earth images.
The Gambian government has taken some
measures to address the country’s growing
rubbish problem, with the president recently
issuing a statement that plastic bags will be
banned from 1 July. It has also increased the
frequency of its national sanitation days to
fortnightly, on which citizens are not allowed
to drive and are expected to stay at home and
clean their neighbourhoods. But waste
management remains underfunded.
New opportunities
However, an ambitious new project that
began in April is supporting coastal
communities to develop their own waste
management solutions by forming social
enterprises. Its aim is to generate new
livelihood opportunities from different
approaches to collecting and recycling waste,
raise public awareness of separating rubbish
and, ultimately, to reduce the amount of waste
going to unregulated landfill.
‘Building capacity for sustainable waste
management for coastal communities
through women and youth livelihoods’ is
the inaugural project of new charity
WasteAid UK, which was founded earlier this
year to combine sustainable waste
management expertise with international
development objectives, a model similar to
that of WaterAid.
The five-month project has been awarded a
£75,000 European Union grant to work with
NGO partner Concern Universal, which
focuses on improving livelihoods, and the
Women’s Initiative Gambia (WIG) – a
women’s group that has been pioneering
waste re-use for several years. Crucially, it has
the support of Brikama Area Council, which
is providing some labour and storage
facilities, and is building links with the
Gambia’s National Environment Agency.
WIG already works with local communities
delivering outreach education on the harmful
effects of burning rubbish and how to re-use
and recycle waste, and getting this message
out to an even wider audience is integral to the
project’s long-term success.
“We really hope that it will sensitise
communities in waste management,” says
Jadama. “Community engagement is really
important. Most of the things people regard as
waste could be recycled.”
“There was virtually no glass or PET water
bottles, despite widespread usage in the local
economy. These are valuable commodities
and are recycled for money or re-used,” he
says. The majority of the waste was plastics
film, the remnants of ubiquitous and flimsy
plastic bags liberally supplied with every
purchase and small pouches of drinking water
sold by street vendors. Organic waste and
sand made up the rest.
“Now that we’ve done this study, which will
be made publicly available on the WasteAid
website, we are looking at how we can add
value to waste streams using proven
techniques and replicable technologies. We
are looking at reprocessing organics and
plastics, which we think are 70% of the waste
stream,” Webster explains.
It is important that the approaches used are
replicable, keeping equipment costs and
training to a minimum. Some of the methods
that will be trialled in the Gambia are already
successfully established by so-called ‘waste to
wealth’ projects in other parts of West Africa,
and beyond.
Paving slabs and fuel briquettes
Through its Waste to Wealth programme,
Living Earth Foundation, also a UK NGO,
has trained community groups in the slums
of Sierra Leone and Cameroon to make
paving slabs from recycled plastics, and fuel
briquettes from food waste as cheaper and
sustainable alternatives to charcoal.
It has provided advice to WasteAid on how
to implement these approaches. The Gambia
project is also looking into opportunities for
composting organic waste and making
fishmeal fertiliser. It is also developing
partnerships with local businesses to collect
waste. The tourism sector – one of Gambia’s
largest economies – is an ideal place to start.
Helpfully, sustainable tourism is already wellestablished in the country, with a number of
eco resorts making the most of the wealth of
culture and natural materials.
“Hotels were doing a lot on energy and
water efficiency but weren’t doing anything
on segregating waste,” says project manager
Daouda Niang. So far, they have been
receptive to supporting the initiative. “They
do see that waste is a problem and are keen
to promote that they are doing something
about it.”
Creating livelihoods
A key element of this project will be
generating livelihoods for the most
marginalised members of society, in
particular the people currently working as
waste-pickers on the city’s dumps, along with
creating opportunities to strengthen women’s
economic independence. “It’s about
livelihoods as much as waste. We are trying to
create jobs by adding value to the materials
and developing public/private sector
partnerships. This means people don’t have to
rely on government solutions,” Webster adds.
A forthcoming report by the International
Solid Waste Association, in collaboration
with the UN Environment Programme, is
expected to argue that making waste
management an international development
priority will be critical to meeting at least four
of the incoming Sustainable Development
Goals that will replace the Millennium
Development Goals this September.
“If you want to solve the problems in an
area then waste is a cross-cutting issue,”
agrees Jadama. RWW
Waste composition analysis
One of the project’s first tasks was to spend a
week on one of the city’s dump sites carrying
out a waste composition analysis – believed to
be the first time such a study has been
undertaken in the country. A team of 10
appointed waste-pickers sorted through 2.5
tonnes of rubbish, and recorded the number
of waste trucks entering the site.
WasteAid consultant Mike Webster says the
real surprise was what wasn’t there.
Sorting through the rubbish and carrying out a waste composition analysis
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