Donkey work
IN the fastgrowing city of Bamako, where authorities struggle to provide adequate public services, Arouna Diabate and his donkey rise before dawn to collect household waste.
In the Malian capital of Bamako, donkey carts driven by young men like 19yearold Arouna Diabate play a vital role battling the fastgrowing city’s waste problem.
Every morning before dawn, Diabate hitches his donkey to a cart and sets off on his rounds, going doortodoor to collect household rubbish, which he delivers to a local waste transfer station for a monthly salary of about $NZ53.
‘‘I won’t be picking up trash with a donkey cart for the rest of my life, but for now people appreciate us because we help clean up the homes of
Bamako,’’ Diabate said.
Mali is one of the poorest countries in the world and the authorities struggle to provide adequate public services in the capital. Bamako’s population more than quadrupled from the mid1970s to 1.8 million as of 2009, according to census data.
The population boom has made the issue of waste disposal in Bamako more acute, requiring Diabate’s boss, Moustapha Diarra, to deploy eight donkey carts in his district instead of the two he managed a decade ago.
The system was overburdened due to a proliferation of informal dumps and the authorities’ failure to remove waste from the local transfer stations, Diarra said.
‘‘The garbage piles up so much that you find it in the roads and when it rains, the water stagnates,’’ he said. ‘‘Without sanitation, you can’t have good health.’’