Talking Trash

This morning my homologue told me he slept much better last night than he had all week. Yesterday marked the last day of a three day training we gave for seventy community leaders on the importance of community waste management and public waste bins. After all the planning and worries that it wouldn’t go smoothly it was relaxing to finally have it over with, but there is still much more to do.

The three days of training were only the first phase in a project to install public waste bins in Vogan.  With the help of the mayor and the director of Hygiene and Sanitation for the prefecture of Vo we sought to educate the community leaders (including all Chefs du Quartiers among others) on why public waste bins are important and how they, as community leaders, can help make this project a success.  The appreciation for the project was evident in the participation we received at the trainings, and of course everyone wanted a bin in their quartier.

Felicity and Delphine with an example bin.

As of now we are installing sixteen public waste bins around the city in locations that are most frequented, such as the marché and public areas of assembly.  We have had a local welder make the bins and we hope to get them all installed later this month. With the availability of public waste bins we hope to encourage people to place their trash in the bins rather than tossing it on the street. 

Installing the bins is, however, not the hardest part of this project; it is going to be getting people to actually use the bins. Simply having public bins and a trash collection program in place doesn’t make people use them.  It is habit for nearly everyone to toss their empty water containers and plastic bags on the ground and simply toss household trash into a pile next to the house.  Hopefully the community will recognize the importance of a clean city and the bins will catch on and people won’t simply toss their trash at their feet. 

To achieve this behavior change we trained community leaders, are having radio public service announcements, and are even working with the mayor to institute fines to those found littering.  With the community’s participation I hope that we can make Vogan a cleaner city and that after we have set the example for the first few bins that the community will take the initiative to make them multiply.

Without the help of many of my Togolese partners, and the community itself, I would not be able to make this project be a success, because as I so tackily said is my speech at the training, “It is not the waste bins that will create the change, but the people of the community.”