Africa’s urbanization rate is 3.5%, the highest in the world. Due to the rapid urbanization in recent years, municipal solid waste management has become a big challenge for many cities, as lower income cities in Africa expected to double their municipal solid waste generation within the next 15-20 years. 

UN-Habitat, with different partners is working to address this ever-increasing waste issue in the urbanizing continent.

One of them is African Clean Cities Platform (ACCP), which was established in 2017 in Maputo, Mozambique, with 24 African countries representative together with Ministry of Environment of Japan (MoEJ), the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA), the City of Yokohama, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat) with the aim of sharing knowledge and good practice and promoting investment in waste management to realize clean cities in Africa by 2030.

UN-Habitat, with support from The United Nations for South-South Cooperation (UNOSSC), is implementing a project in Sierra Leone, South-South Cooperation in Sustainable Waste Management - Waste Wise Koidu, supported by Government of China, facilitating city-to-city knowledge, experience exchanges and partnerships brokering through the form of south-south and triangular collaboration.

With the Covenant of Mayors in Sub-Saharan Africa (CoM SSA), UN-Habitat is providing capacity development training on waste and energy in the Covid-19 recovery context for Burkina Faso, Cameroon and Kenya promoting city-to-city cooperation and knowledge sharing around municipal solid waste management to mitigate climate change.

As a part of joint effort of various initiatives above, the Africa Waste Webinar Series aim to share knowledge and experiences to tackle common challenges in solid waste management observed in the continent so that the member countries and cities can interactively learn solutions for improved solid waste management and shift towards urban circular economy. The first webinar series consist of below five webinars.

1. How to Improve Waste Collection Rate in African Cities?
2. Covid Waste Management in Africa
3. How to Turn Open Dumpsites to Controlled Waste Disposal Facility in African Cities?
4. Waste and climate change – Appropriate technologies and good practices in Africa
5. Plastic pollution from waste – How to “stop the tap” of plastic leakage in African cities?

#5 Plastic pollution from waste – How to “stop the tap” of plastic leakage in African cities?

Date & Time: 7th July 2022, 11.00 WAT/14.00 EAT/20.00 JST

Partners: GIZ/ComSSA and UNOSSC

Zoom Link: https://un-org.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJ0sc-usrToqHdWu8oQUNLROCd81Ex3uiypr

Background and introduction:

Marine litter is found in all the world’s oceans and seas, even in remote areas far from human contact and obvious sources of pollution, constituting an increasing risk to ecosystem health and biodiversity, while entailing substantial economic costs through its impacts on public health, tourism, shipping, fishing and aquaculture.

It is known that about 80% of marine litter originates from land-based human activities and some estimates say that every year, at least 11 million tons of plastic find their way into the world’s oceans. This is rooted in unsustainable production and consumption patterns, poor solid waste management and lack of infrastructure, adequate legal and policy frameworks and poor enforcement, including on interregional cross-border trade of plastic waste, and a lack of financial resources both at national and local governments level.

This webinar aims to highlight the current findings of Wase Wise Cities Tool (WaCT), developed by UN-Habitat, and Waste Flow Diagram (WDF), developed by GIZ), focusing on African cities to better grasp dynamics between solid waste management systems’ performances and plastic leakages as well as common trends in solid waste management in the Africa continent, while shedding light on emerging innovative solutions to tackle plastic pollution and stop of plastic leakages.