Building Zero Waste Communities, One City at a Time
Martin Tumusiime is a 25-year-old Ugandan tech entrepreneur, CEO and Co-Founder of Yo-Waste, who used his education, tech-savvy and entrepreneurial skills to connect garbage generators with garbage collectors. Martindesigneda mobile app to be downloaded from Google Play and Apple App Store.
Martin realised that climate change is adversely affecting the livelihood of millions of Ugandans involved in agriculture. According to the International Trade Administration, 80% of this African country’s land is arable, but only 35% is being cultivated. In 2021/22, agriculture accounted for about 24.1% of GDP and 33% of export earnings. It is estimated that around 70% of Uganda’s working population is employed in agriculture.
This forward-thinking young entrepreneur saw the impact on the communities and as with other youths in the country, inventing ground-breaking innovations and forming social enterprises to address some of the contributors to climate change in their communities, Martin decided it was time to act and deal with climate change in these communities. In the capital city of Kampala, severe floods cause major difficulties and make the city unsafe to live in.
Waste Removal – an African continental problem
“At Yo-Waste, we realised that when people’s trash or garbage is rarely collected on time, they resort to desperate mechanisms to manage and dispose of their waste such as dumping their waste in water channels or burning it in the open, all methods contributing to greenhouse gas emissions and other environmental hazards,” Martin maintains.
The Yo-Waste App connects generators of garbage such as households and businesses to local waste collectors in their communities for proper waste collection and disposal in ways not harming the environment. In the Entebbe municipality alone, more than 1,000 households are using the app to manage and safely dispose of 10.5 tons of municipal solid waste per day. This eliminates more than 300 tons of waste that would have ended up on streets, in water channels or burnt in the open, which is not only negatively affecting the Planet, but creates various health hazards as well.
With their own trucks, Yo-Waste has also partnered with local waste collectors and hauliers. The company has more than 30 partner waste collectors collecting more than 10.5 tons of household waste per day, servicing more than 10 000 households. Yo-Waste also provides smart solutions for home and other types of recycling. It also removes hazardous medical waste, services hotels and restaurants, other food services and grocery stores. Martin could not have addressed a more serious problem as there is just one landfill in Uganda, the Kiteezi landfill, which is facing significant environmental and sustainability challenges.
According to the World Bank, in 2020, the world was already generating 2.24 billion tons of solid waste, amounting to a footprint of 0.79 kilograms per person per day. This is expected to grow by 70% by 2050 (3.5 billion tons per day.)
