Zanzibar’s Pemba Island confronts a 230-tonne a day waste problem offering a blueprint Africa can use

Excerpt from africasustainabilitymatters.com

A new assessment of Pemba Island, in the Zanzibar Archipelago, has put hard numbers to a long-felt reality: the island generates more than 230 tonnes of waste every day, much of it burned in the open or dumped in informal sites. The study, led by RSK Environment (East Africa) with Lumen Associates and Patrick Matandala for the NGOs LVIA and Oikos East Africa, argues that the crisis is fixable if authorities lean into data-led planning, small-scale processing and community enterprise, a package the team has framed in a locally owned “Theory of Change.”

The timing is deliberate; Pemba is one of three Tanzanian cities targeted by the European Union’s Green and Smart Cities SASA programme — a TZS 190 billion (about €75 million) Team Europe Initiative launched in 2024 to bankroll greener infrastructure and jobs. In Pemba, LVIA and Oikos have been contracted to translate that big ticket into block-and-tackle improvements in how waste is collected and treated.