Last week it rained relentlessly. The torrential showers transformed the hill into a trickling stream of mud, plastic, and rainwater. Garbage from around the neighborhood was swept away by the rains, finding a new home along the hill, making my walk up and down particularly unpleasant. This trash makeover was evident in many other parts of Freetown as well, making a city that struggles with cleanliness dirtier, and making the already difficult job of its waste collectors even harder.
Freetown has an innovative approach to waste collection and disposal. Although an essential city function, their limited finances make it difficult for the city to effectively provide this service. As a result, the city relies on independently formed waste management micro-enterprise groups or tricycle groups to collect household waste and clean public spaces. To help with the former, these groups are provided with donor funded tricycles by the FCC along with basic business development training. They are then responsible for registering households as customers and servicing them.
The program model banks on groups to expand their businesses, adding more and more households into their fold. This ensures that both the city’s solid waste collection improves as well as the income stream of the sanitation workers. In theory, this program holds a lot of promise. Yet, this promise seemed unrealized for many of the sanitation workers we interviewed.
Sitting in the Lumley community center, Esther and I spoke with tricycle group members from the neighborhood. The stories we heard were similar. The workers were poor, making do on a tiny monthly income. They were often illiterate or had minimal education, with very few other opportunities available to them. They were grateful for the tricycle groups, although the tricycles often broke down and none of them reported actually driving it. A few things puzzled me. The program hinges on groups leveraging the tricycles to expand waste collection and through it their incomes. So why were incomes so low? And why was no one driving the tricycles?
As we dug a bit deeper, the answers started to become clearer. A strong theme that emerged was that tricycle driving and by extension waste collection was primarily done by one person in each group, as others were not trained on how to do so. If the driver was sick or unavailable, the work stalled, and the group was impacted financially. Moreover, with little oversight, some drivers were guilty of pocketing part of the collected dues rather than sharing it with the group, further reducing their income
There is a strong gendered dimension to this as well, as the tricycle drivers tend to be men. Only one of the twelve women we spoke to reported driving a tricycle. Others seemed to rely on the men in their group for this, with some all-women groups even hiring male drivers specifically to ride the tricycle. This effectively excluded the women from household waste collection and the related income source.
With no alternatives and families to support, the tricycle groups are lifelines for many Freetonians. They provide a small but steady income to those who are often struggling to make ends meet. Yet the program has the potential to provide so much more. Refocusing the program on its core business model and taking steps to address gender disparities can help sanitation workers more than just meet their daily needs. With a little FCC support, it can become a vehicle for transformative change, giving these workers a chance at a better, more stable life.