Location: DAR ES SALAAM, TANZANIA
Keywords:
"Household sorting"
" Stakeholder involvement"
COMMUNITY AWARENESS CAMPAIGN INCITES BEHAVIOURAL CHANGE ON WASTE MANANGEMENT IN DAR ES SALAAM, TANZANIA
The project was deployed to two sub-wards (Kibangu & Mwogozo) in the Kinondoni Municipal Council and had an outreach of 29,804 people living in 6,623 households in total. It was executed in September 2015 by International Solid Waste Association (ISWA) as part of the Climate and Clean Air Coalition Municipal Solid Waste Initiative in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Oher stakeholders involved in the project are; Ministry of Environment, Dar es Salaam City Council (DCC), Makuburi ward, Tencel leader (leader who manages 10 houses), BORDA (The Bremen Overseas Research & Development Association), Nipe Fagio and community members. The aim of the community awareness campaign was to aid in raising awareness on environmental and solid waste management problems and solutions in households by initiating a “Cleanest sub-ward competition”. 
The awareness campaigns were conducted through door-to-door visits, contact with the community and school groups and a monthly clean-up exercise while the sub-ward competition was introduced through a capacity- building event provided to municipal representatives and community leaders. One of the objectives of the programme was to motivate behavioural change at community level in order to achieve proper solid waste management by various measures such as improved solid waste collection services and support and guidance to community leaders to provide them with sound waste management solutions.
The competition ultimately encouraged citizens to give waste to the authorizes service provider and pay their waste fees.
The project which considered zones with low and middle-income areas with unplanned settlements, gaps in solid waste management and limited accessibility had the following components:
- Establishment of a project platform which consisted of representatives of Dar City Council, Kinondoni Municipality, Nipe Fagio and other stakeholders after project has been defined with ISWA. Primarily, the platform was created to introduce the project to stakeholders and discuss potential approaches of project implementation;
- A project area (sub-ward level) was selected and endorsed by BORDA and the Kinondoni Municipal Council;
- A baseline stud conducted to investigate and understand community needs, knowledge and attitudes of household relating to solid waste management, collection of basic waste generation and management data;
- An awareness raising campaign organised to encourage source separation of waste at household level and payment of collection fees to a formal service provider and;
- Establishment of incentives for community open space to be used as a recreational area.
It was observed at the end of the community group awareness programme that majority of the women recognized the need to stop the burning of plastic bags which was used to light up charcoal, waste management practices of participating households had improved, thus proving that group education is efficient, the understanding of the community on payment of waste fees to illegal waste collectors had significantly improved and identification of opportunities for community based organisations to introduce reusable bags as they are both environmentally and economically beneficial.
In the case of the community clean-up events, three (3) community clean-up events were conducted during the project in collaboration with Nipe Fagio. It was observed that service providers agreed to haul the collected wastes for free and the clean-up events recorded increasing participants from 20 at inception to over 100 at the last event. Mwogozo sub-ward emerged as the cleaner sub-ward in the community competition based on evaluation criteria developed and approved.
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