Cleaning up Namboole and giving livelihoods to people

Story 2

Namboole as popularly known is a hill around Bweyogerere found on the Jinja Kampala highway and is home to Uganda’s national stadium “Mandela National stadium” named after the late Nelson Mandela.

The construction of this stadium resulted in a creation of a small community. Around this area is a vibrant community that benefit mostly from match and/or sports days and events held within the stadium. Due to its proximity to the stadium and the highway connecting the eastern region to the city, a lot of traffic goes through this area leaving behind a lot of solid waste. A good percentage people that call Namboole home are living below the poverty line and so cannot afford most of the basic services such as rubbish collection. This area is also home to  two illegal waste dumping sites with many people making a living off these sites.

WTG came into this community in 2017, because we knew we could help the residents improve their standard of living and environment. In Namboole WTG set up a system of having one big time supplier who caters for all the people in that area.

Namboole in numbers:

Number of suppliers: 3

Average tonnage per month: 4 tonne

Number of Kilos of plastic collected 2018: 14.8 tonnes

Number of staff hired from this area: 9

It is here that we find a lady that has spent a good part of eight years working as a scavenger (plastic waste salvager). Known to us as mama Sawiya  nick-named after one of her children, we met this lady in early June 2017 when the company was trying to get access to Kampala and she has been a WTG supplier and main contact ever since. 

Mama Sawiya is a Musoga lady that moved to Kampala just like many people who migrate to the city in search of a better life from that they had in the village. She is married with a number of kids Sawiya being one of them. When we first started working with mama Sawiya she told us of how she had been in abusive marriage of which her husband was a drunkard and could not provide for her kids and that’s why she started collecting plastics to make ends meet and she decided to get her own place with her kids. She does not see collecting or salvaging plastic as a dirty job or a bad way of earning a living but rather as she puts it “it is a job that enables her take her children through school.”

Mama sawiya is a very hardworking lady and she has managed to get us on average a tonne of plastics every week. This is through her own collections and encouraging other community members to collect and sell to her.

In line with our vision, WTG not only goes into communities to collect the plastics but also to sensitize and give advice and counsel to the people within those communities. As we write this story mama Sawiya and her husband are back together and he now also helps her in collecting plastics and they are living happily together.

Namboole as a community has been good business to WTG. It is here that we opened our 1stsorting facility for all the plastics. The community has also provided WTG with a number of line workers to help with the sorting and loading of incoming and outgoing material.