Uber-style app allows Harare’s citizens to hail a rubbish collector

The stench of decaying rubbish fills the air around Euphrasia Mangwe’s Harare house. It is an irritation the mother of four has become accustomed to. The rubbish bins in her neighbourhood in the Zimbabwean capital are supposed to be emptied once a week, but often they go untouched for up to four weeks.

So, Mangwe does what many other residents do. She waits until dark and then tosses her rubbish into an open space near her home.

“It is horrible, having to live near garbage. That we are not sick is a wonder when we are always surrounded by mounts of waste,” she said. “Waste collection is a basic right, the same as water. But not here.”

Constrained by a lack of fuel and funding in the country’s worst economic crisis in a decade, the government struggles to keep its cities clean.

In Harare, it manages to collect only two-thirds of the 30,000 tons of garbage residents produce each month, Harare city council spokesperson Michael Chideme told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

So the private sector is sweeping in to help with a new mobile-based solution. The digital service from local waste management company Clean City Africa works through a popular ride-hailing app to connect households and workplaces with collection firms.

To use the “Uber-type” service, launched in July, a customer schedules and pays for garbage collections through the Vaya Africa app, said Clean City Africa CEO Lovemore Nyatsine.

Then one of more than 200 franchisees picks up the customer’s waste from their doorstep and takes it to a landfill sites — instead of customers having to do it themselves or filling in an online form.

Chideme said the city has had a waste collection shortfall since early 2018, but many residents complained they have not had regular rubbish collections for at least the past five years.

Nyatsine said he first became aware of how acute the problem was during the 2018 cholera outbreak in the densely populated Glen View and Budiriro suburbs, which left at least 50 dead.

Officials said that the outbreak had been caused by burst sewer pipes that contaminated drinking water. The waste piling up around the city was worsening the crisis, Nyatsine said.

He was part of a team from Econet Wireless Zimbabwe to join other volunteers in sweeping streets, cleaning drains and picking up rubbish.

But once they had finished cleaning an area, it became clear that the council did not have the capacity to dispose of all the garbage they had collected.

“We realised it was not just a problem of the cholera-afflicted suburbs, but city-wide,” Nyatsine said. In response, Econet subsidiary Cassava Smartech created Clean City Africa.

Working with local authorities and its franchises, the company can now cover more than 500,000 households in Harare and its suburbs, Nyatsine noted, and has plans to roll the service out to other cities in Zimbabwe by the end of the year.

More than 50 illegal dump sites have been cleared across Harare since the company launched, he said.

Kudakwashe Ncube, a resident of the suburb of Cranborne, said there has been a marked improvement in waste collection since the Clean City Africa initiative started.

He and his neighbours tried other private waste management companies, he added, but they never seemed to have enough trucks to cope with Harare’s mounting waste.

“Some residents were looking for alternatives such as dumping in common areas ... others were burning their litter in their yards, again polluting the environment.”

As for the local authorities, Harare city councillor Norman Makondo said they welcomed any help they could get from private waste collection companies. “I’m happy to see companies like Clean City Africa come in, because they have the capacity to clean and collect garbage in [a] short period,” Makondo said.

“We could not keep up with collecting garbage.”

When announcing the 2019 budget in December 2018, Chideme told reporters the council would increase spending on water and sanitation, which included investing in more rubbish trucks.

After collecting rubbish for free for the first few months, Clean City Africa now charges up to Z$28.50 per collection.

But Precious Shumba, head of the Harare Residents’ Trust, said while he applauds the work the company is doing, he worries its service is “elitist”, granting regular waste collection only to people who can pay for it.

And many who cannot afford to pay for waste collection are signing up for private services and sacrificing other essentials because they feel they have no other option, he said.

“Many residents have enlisted for the service, but it does not mean they want it — they are desperate,” Shumba said. “It is not sustainable.”

For Gamuchirai Beta, a resident of Mbare suburb, Clean City Africa’s success only highlights the local government’s inability to keep up. “The [council] should privatise garbage collection.”

30,000 The waste in tons the residents of Harare produce every month, of which the city council is able to collect only a third.