Keeping the Town Clean and the Value Local: A Locally Financed Resource-Recovery Model for Small African Cities

• Kwame Brako Denteh

  Ghana Institute of Management and Public Administration, Accra, Ghana

  Author

Rapid urbanisation in sub-Saharan Africa is concentrated not only in megacities but in a fast-growing tier of small and secondary cities, where uncollected and openly dumped waste is among the most visible threats to public health and the urban environment. Research and investment have focused on large cities, leaving smaller towns with collection models that they cannot afford to run. This paper reviews completed and documented field experience with community source-separation incentives, community buy-back schemes, rewards-for-recycling logistics, franchised zonal micro-enterprise collection, decentralised composting and city-scale clean-city governance, and distils the lessons that recur across these cases. Building on that evidence, the paper proposes TownLoop, a closed-loop resource-recovery model designed for the conditions of a single small city: micro-zones served by paid community enterprises, a simple two-stream separation at the household, local conversion of the organic majority into compost for nearby farms, a single shared aggregation hub for dry recyclables, and two governance mechanisms that are the paper's main contribution. The first is a local clearing council that verifies recovered quantities and coverage and settles payments on a fixed cycle. The second is a coverage-linked payment formula that ties enterprise income to the share of households reliably served rather than to tonnage alone, aligning private incentives with the public goal of a clean and fully served town. The paper sets out the unit economics and the threshold at which local revenues cover operating cost, the conditions for scaling within a town and across a national network of secondary cities, and a phased eighteen-month pilot with indicators aligned to the clean-cities monitoring framework and Sustainable Development Goal target 11.6.

• PDF

Copyright (c) 2019 Package Printing

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

All articles published are made available under the Creative Commons Attribution–NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) licence.