Leadership and governance: how Kanifing transformed its waste service

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity. Names and technical terms have been corrected, and brief webinar administration has been removed. The substance of the conversation has not been changed.

Zoë Lenkiewicz: Thank you so much, Swetha, and welcome everyone, especially Mayor Bensouda. Thank you so much for your time. We’re really grateful. Look, in honour of our guest, I’m going to take you for just a moment to the Gambia. Okay, it’s a small West African country, almost entirely surrounded by Senegal with the River Gambia running through its heart. When I visited a few months ago, we took a boat trip along the river and saw chimpanzees moving through the trees. It was a wonderful reminder of what we’re working to protect. For me, waste management is about preventing pollution and protecting the natural world we all rely on, as well as public health, livelihoods and dignity. It must work as an essential public service day after day, and long after a pilot or grant has ended. Built to Last, this series asks what helps a promising waste initiative become a resilient local system. It draws on Global Waste Lab’s seven foundations of a resilient waste system developed through many years of field experience, learning from colleagues and through my research for the United Nations Global Waste Management Outlook. Thank you, Swetha. Please could you show the slide? Now, you’ll notice it’s a wheel. Partly because the foundations are interconnected and partly because we need waste systems to keep on rolling. Around it are leadership and governance, evidence base, climate integration, inclusive engagement. Community asset recognition, appropriate solutions and financial sustainability. They work together, and weakness in one can undermine the others. The series runs up to the International Solid Waste Association’s World Congress in London, my home city, where Global Waste Lab is a knowledge partner. And the Chartered Institution of Waste Management has endorsed this series for continuing professional development. You can also explore your own strengths and gaps across the seven foundations through the free Resilience Review on our website. Today, we begin with the leadership and governance foundation. It has three practical elements. The first is political priority. This means leaders recognise waste management as essential and give it the authority and resources it needs.

The second is roles and coordination. We need clear responsibilities and people working together. And finally, accountability and enforcement mean making sure commitments are acted on, services are delivered, and rules are followed. Leadership creates direction, governance provides the budgets, the by-laws, the teams and systems that keep progress moving. I’m going to introduce our guest speaker who you’re all here to hear from, and it’s difficult to imagine a better person to open this conversation. I first met Mayor Bensouda in 2019 and his leadership has inspired me ever since. He became the youngest mayor in The Gambia’s history when elected in 2018 and was re-elected in 2023. During his tenure, municipal waste collection has risen from 4% to 76%. Kanifing has built a comprehensive collection service, created jobs, invested in organic waste and glass recovery, improved the dumpsite, and strengthened the by-laws, people, and systems behind the service.

They’ve also secured a huge investment for youth-led collection in hard to reach communities, which I’m looking forward to hearing about. So look, Mayor Bensouda is now also a presidential candidate, so I’m especially grateful that he has made time to join us today. Mayor Bensouda, thank you for being here and opening the series. We’re really glad to have you here. Over to you, thank you.

Mayor Talib Ahmed Bensouda: Thank you, Zoë. Thank you, Swetha and all the people who have come into the Global Waste Lab. It’s always a pleasure talking about waste management. My first love. As you have rightly said, waste management has been top priority at the Kanifing Municipality, because when we came in, there was no waste management system in place. And you can imagine, with a city of half a million people, 5,000 people per square kilometre. The density is quite large, meaning the volume of waste generated is significant. So coming in, looking at a problem, being a mayor who believes in problem solving, and looking at the priority of the people is how do we develop a process-driven, comprehensive and sustainable waste management system? I didn’t want to do like other politicians, which is to do the easy things, low-hanging fruit, look like we’re working, holding a shovel in front of a camera. I wanted to leave a legacy. So we set about to set up a comprehensive waste management system, which is now a model for other cities in our country.

We had to do it with our resources. So how do you solve a problem that is capital intensive without resources? And so we came up with a public-private partnership model. We came up with a process that enabled us to acquire compactor trucks that raised waste collection from 4% to 76%, bringing malaria cases down more than 50% in many communities. And of course, generally having a cleaner environment. And we believe it has contributed to the economic development of our region, though we do not yet have the data to measure it. A cleaner environment encourages more investment because clean means good and positive and likely to bring returns. So, we are becoming more intelligent about waste management as well. Now we’re using data, we’re doing surveys, we’re using software and GPS systems to track the progress and making connections and correlations between simple things such as air quality versus, you know, collection in a particular area. So we’ve come a long way. We are now at a place where we’re looking at the next phase, which is not just collection, but processing and management of what we collect. And I must say, it is an ambitious next phase, given that it’s a lot of work. But generally, we’ve had good people and good partners. Not much can be achieved without people who are just as passionate as you are, and partners who are willing to go the distance. And that’s literally the two ingredients you need to build sustainable systems. Because at the end of the day, it comes back to people and what they’re willing to offer. So I’m not sure if I’ve answered your question, Zoë, but basically this is where we are, and any questions I’d be happy to add.

Zoë Lenkiewicz: You made waste management a pillar of your election campaigns in both 2018 and 2023. What convinced you that this was an issue that you could and should lead on politically, and why has it remained such a priority?

Mayor Talib Ahmed Bensouda: Oof. Well, for me, it was an easy decision because I had come into office with waste piled or dumped by the community in front of the mayor’s office. It was a protest where markets were inundated with waste and everybody was calling the municipality useless and saying the mayor had shown no initiative on waste management. And there was a huge protest in the municipal markets, and they had gathered all the waste and dumped it in front of the mayor’s office. So, as soon as I saw that, I said, I don’t want that to ever happen to me. So it was an easy decision. However, on a more serious note, like I’ve said, in the history of The Gambia, there’s never been a comprehensive waste management system. When we were young, people did not have a way to collect or manage waste. Although in that era, people lived more organically and more naturally, there were fewer plastics and fewer things to throw away.

There was a lot of reusing of items, given it was a smaller, poorer population. But of course, with economic prosperity, the generation of waste increases. And as countries industrialise, they generate more waste. Our problem was quite obvious. There was waste all over the place. I remember there was about 400 community dumpsites. You know, wherever you look, whether it’s in the riverine area, like those beautiful mangroves you described when you started Or whether it was around unfinished buildings, or whether it is in the drainage system. Waste was just dumped everywhere, and it was the number one complaint when we did some research. So it was easy to commit to it. For me, it was a passion as well. I am a person who loves scenic green environments, clean environments, and waste was destroying Gambia’s natural scenery. And Gambia is known to be a tourist destination. We are known to be the smiling coast of Africa.

We are known to be a destination where you come and bathe in the sun and enjoy the people and the environment. And that was changing in front of me. So as a young mayor who’s been around the world, who knows the importance of you know, a clean environment, as we say in our local language, health is wealth. It became an easy political priority. However, the difficulty was very little work had been done in this area, so there was a bit of risk. There was nothing to build on. When we came into office, the municipality, where, as I said, half a million people live, had only two tractors to collect waste, old tractors and about I think one or two used trucks that had broken down. We have 19 markets, which, as you have seen, generate a lot of organic waste daily. We had about 35,000 households that are also generating waste daily. And how do we deal with this mess with a very limited revenue base and access to capital? So it was a challenge. It reflected people’s priorities at the time. And it was the top priority of what people wanted to get done in a new municipal government. So this is how we narrowed down that waste is by far number one, which was closely followed by the road network, etc.

Zoë Lenkiewicz: Sure. Yeah, and you have just done such a superb job. So you’re talking about you’ve got the waste to collect from the markets, all that organic waste. So that’s something that you’ve done some quite impressive initiatives around, haven’t you? Would you like to just tell us about one or two of those?

Mayor Talib Ahmed Bensouda: Absolutely. When we addressed the solid waste issue, well, not solved completely, but I think 76% is good progress from 4%. We then looked at organic waste. The beauty is that it does not have to end up in a landfill. And there’s economic benefits to it. We have started composting. We started composting as initial projects and looking for partnerships and knowledge. We partnered with the Mbolo Foundation, which is a local organisation that, you know, specialises in turning organic materials into compost. With some pilot projects there, we were able to develop a major project, which is the first ever compost plant in our country, which is now being built at Bakau Women’s Garden. We wanted to close the loop. We wanted, you know, a circular economy. So now we are saying, okay, let’s work with a women’s garden. Get the spoilage there, get market waste.

Put it in the compost plant. They would then use the compost to do their gardening. And now we are also building a market at the women’s garden. So everything is in one place. This is now one of the municipality’s major projects and a source of pride. And it’s really something we are having great strides in. We also recently brought about the first ever tyre recycling plant. Because with the solid waste, there’s not much we can do with tyres, and people would burn them, and they can be burned during unrest, and if you bury them, they’d be here for another 100,000 years. So that was also something major I wanted to achieve. We are lucky with partnerships to also bring about the first tyre recycling plant, which would shred the tyres, retrieve metals, and turn the rubber into rubber granules that could be used in playgrounds or road building. This is another major development in waste management

And lastly, of course, with the landfill, you know ambition we had, we have a great partnership with the European Investment Bank, where they’ve committed 50 million euros to build the first ever engineered landfill in the country Meaning, we would be able to be in a position to close and rehabilitate our current dumpsite and hopefully turn it into a green space. So these are some of the exciting projects happening.

Zoë Lenkiewicz: Thank you. And it’s really impressive the way that Kanifing Municipal Council has worked with neighbouring councils as well on this project, the plans for the new sanitary landfill. And that doesn’t come easily sometimes, does it? It’s a long time to keep working together and there’s different pressures coming from different directions, you know, very, very urban councils and quite rural ones working together as well might have different priorities and so on. So, yeah, I commend you on that. I know we’ve been talking about it for a long time, and it feels like it’s really happening, so that’s very exciting. Okay, so look, moving from… Oh, go on. Yeah.

Mayor Talib Ahmed Bensouda: Okay, so.

Zoë Lenkiewicz: Yeah, please.

Mayor Talib Ahmed Bensouda: Yeah, so I wanted to speak on the political challenges. So with politics, of course, there’s always a battle for credit. Of course, I’m a presidential candidate. So the government did not want to see me as the person who was able to solve waste management. So when we have major projects that require cooperation, of course, there’s that friction about who should implement and who should take credit. So those are realities. And of course, there is also rural–urban tension sort of in the sense, for lack of a better word where urbanised councils are seen to be richer, better off. Seem to benefit from all international partnerships. And that also poses a challenge. How do you get rural authorities to also feel like equal stakeholders in such projects?

Zoë Lenkiewicz: Yes, delicate. So there are political waters to navigate. Yeah, yeah, no, and it’s I’ve seen that over the last, I don’t know how many years now, and I appreciate it’s not easy. And the sanitary landfill, the site for that. Because there’s no space in the very urbanised councils, right? So the sanitary landfill is going in the more rural authority area, which then brings other delicate political matters to the fore, right?

Mayor Talib Ahmed Bensouda: Absolutely. So, our dumpsite was not planned. Like I said, there was no waste management plan in the past. People did not take it seriously. The population was small. So they found a mining quarry, and basically started dumping there. It was 25 metres deep. But that mining quarry, which was isolated 30 years ago, has a community that has moved next to it. And of course, with dumping happening during that period, now there are thousands of tonnes of waste that has now turned from a hole to a hill. There are several challenges. There’s a challenge of leachate, right? The water table potentially being poisoned up to 5 kilometres radius. There’s the challenge of waste burning. There’s a community next door. So air quality challenges. And there’s a challenge of generally just a poor scenery where the dumpsite is. So one of the things I forgot to mention is when we came in, one of the challenges was how do we deal with this problem? We have no other place to dump, but four communities have moved into this particular area, there’s four communities that have moved in. And how do we solve it short term? So I visited a landfill in Wisconsin. I found my solution in Yahara Landfill in Wisconsin, where a site engineer, John, I described my problem, and he said, ‘Just fence it. Start by fencing it’ until you can figure it out. Because if it’s out of sight, it’s out of mind, you know? So, that was one of the best moves we did, because fencing it not only kept it out of sight, but it also limited access to the public. Which meant it limited waste burning as well. So that was the first step to solving parts of the problem while we figured out a long-term solution.

Zoë Lenkiewicz: Yeah, and that’s really, really good advice for other places. There are so many places around the world that have got these informal dumpsites in cities, they might have been outside of the city, but gradually over time with urbanization and population growth, the city has enveloped them. And I remember when I first came to the Gambia, it was in a pretty rough state, you know, in the heavy rains, the streets around would be kind of flooded with this black liquid, and you started a campaign to clear all the drains before the rainy season, didn’t you, so that it would At least be able to wash away. There were fires, as you said, people were using it as a shortcut as well to get from one neighbourhood to the other. And yeah, no, it’s wonderful, and it’s been some time now since there was a fire there, isn’t there

So that’s really, really positive for the public. Now, I’m just looking at the Q&A here, because quite a few people are saying, well, how did you convince people? How did you convince them to, you know, the public to take part in your collection system, and how did you convince the bureaucrats and officers within the council that this was something worth, you know, investing time and blood, sweat and tears in to get it fixed.

Mayor Talib Ahmed Bensouda: Well, I’m not sure I would use the word convince. I think I was bullish about it. Like any aggressive idea, there’s always resistance. There’ll be resistance from the political class because they don’t want you to have a success, right? There’s a resistance from the staff because they don’t want change. They’re used to a certain way of doing things. In a small country like Gambia, habits, especially bad ones, die very hard. So, there’s also resistance from the community. Why do they have to pay for waste management? Because we had to keep it sustainable. So we had to introduce a fee, which was very negligible, as far as we were concerned. But apparently not so much by the community. They were dumping for free, and now they have to pay for it. How do we explain that dumping for free has an environmental cost and a health cost, right? So paying a fee for it has a value for your environment and

And there was resistance also, especially from political circles where people saw it as a political project, another politician coming with a white elephant project to gain credit. So there was a lot of I would say resistance, but at the same time, I had to be very firm with my belief that this had to be done and needed to be done. Right? And also there was resistance with the budget because councillors and interest groups want the budget to be spent on other areas. And I had to put up a case that waste management is by far the most important consequential initiative we can take on. It took probably about four or five months before people were convinced, but I had to convince them with results, and not necessarily with narratives. One result, like we said, when people start seeing weekly service at their homes, others who were resisting. Would capitulate and, you know, basically want to have the same service, because a neighbour would rave about, you know how their life has improved because their waste is being collected. So that would break down the resistance. And then we started having local champions and advocates. And our councillors would also, of course, have their proxies in the community raving about the project. So that brought about sort of change as well you know you have to use a lot of media engagement, not the type that seems like a public service announcement, or that seems very out of touch and coming from outside. We would make short videos using Facebook and TikTok with our waste collectors about the adventures they would have in community, about the interactions they would have in the community. But at the same time, there’s a side of governance as well

Where it’s a carrot and stick approach, where we would now increase the penalties on people who would not comply. People who would still go and dump. We would have to arrest some people. We would have to sort of publicly shame some people, right, for being litterbugs. And that as well contributed to success in the project where now the project is no longer seen as a privilege. It’s seen as a right. So even when the truck misses a community on a certain week, you get threats of protest. So it’s quite an interesting change.

Zoë Lenkiewicz: Yeah, that’s a huge transformation, isn’t it? And I think what you were saying there about, you know, with the behaviour change, people, because sometimes people think that you need to do the awareness raising and behaviour change first and then implement the service. But really, you need to have a reliable service in order to change people’s behaviour, right? You can’t change people’s behaviour and then miss a few weeks and expect them to keep up.

Mayor Talib Ahmed Bensouda: So you’re perfectly right. The service is what changed the behaviour When people can feel it, when people can see it, it’s more of experiential marketing, right? To experience it is better than to talk about it, or to listen about it, you know? So, I think, like, every good change, leaders have to lay out their vision, implement it, and the people sort of follow. And that’s what leadership is about.

Zoë Lenkiewicz: Nice. I love that. We’ll definitely have that as a sound bite. Now look, a few people in the chat, Sandra and Verily, are asking about, they’re curious about the intersection between your municipal experience. The national, you know, whether waste management has been a national priority. And then, you know. Post presidential elections, let’s say, you know, hopefully you succeed. How have you prepared Kanifing Municipality to continue, with, you know, with these great services? It’s kind of that that institutional strength that’s part of the leadership that you’ve been delivering to.

Mayor Talib Ahmed Bensouda: Right, so definitely one of the biggest challenges we have had to make any major inroads in waste management is the lack of cooperation of the central government. And waste is not a priority. It’s not a political priority for the central government. Because for so long, waste management has been branded as a local issue. The responsibility belongs to local government to the point where the national government feels insulated from the problem itself. Okay. I think their philosophy is, if it’s not your problem, don’t get into it, right? So because the moment you start doing something about it, you might shift perceptions, and people might start thinking, oh, this is actually a national issue. So, it’s especially so given that local governments were largely led by opposition parties and the central government, of course, is the ruling party. So that has, of course, aggravated.

The problem, but certainly if waste management was a national priority spearheaded and championed by the national government, I think there was a lot more access to resources, a lot more things that could have been done to bring about a comprehensive national plan that would limit the problem of waste management. So we’ve had to punch above our weight from the local level. We’ve had to sort of initiate without them. We’ve had to sort of leverage sometimes on powers we don’t even have We just dare do it, because no one else is doing it. And now it’s causing people to ask, how come government is not supporting these guys or is not making any major inroads in waste management? And I think recently, this year. They have finally started feeling the heat because we have also applied political pressure using radio, parliament and other channels, to talk about government inaction. Now, coming to, of course, my aspirations to be a president

And to usher The Gambia into prosperity, and towards becoming a developed country, is we look at the Singapore model, right? We understudy what Lee Kuan Yew was able to achieve from the 1960s, where Singapore was similar to Gambia in the sense. Zero waste management, limited resources, quite poor, was able to transform how the world saw Singapore using waste management. So things like no spitting in the street, not throwing gum in the street, improving the flora and fauna, making Singapore a more attractive country actually is what led to corporations wanting to be headquartered in Singapore. What led to investments pouring into Singapore. So waste management is a cornerstone of my presidential campaign as one of the things we want to get fixed. We want The Gambia to be the cleanest. You know, country in Africa.

Zoë Lenkiewicz: Okay. So you’re going to also make waste management a presidential priority, which I’m really, really pleased about because having visited many other places in the country now, fortunately, I can see, you know, many of them are struggling in the same way that you were back when you came in. They’ve got maybe one or two tractors. A few older vehicles, but there’s, you know, informal dumpsites here and there and everywhere, and it’s just an ongoing fight to try and get the stuff cleared and taken to the dumpsite as a minimum. Dumpsites lack walls or fencing. You know the experience that you’ve had within your, you know, your own Gambian context is going to be really valuable for other councils to learn from. And do you feel that Kanifing has really influenced and inspired other councils around the country? Are they looking to you and Kanifing as a beacon of hope and a great example and how are you helping them with your knowledge and experience?

Mayor Talib Ahmed Bensouda: Yeah, so Kanifing is now being seen as the innovator. As far as municipal governance is concerned, generally. We are also being seen as the platform that is evolving local government service. The concept of the public servant – the servant leader – is something that has been brought about, I would say, by my interventions and how I approach problems, and not waiting for help. So one of the brands we have is we don’t wait for help. We initiate and then seek partnership. This is something that is now causing a ripple effect across the country, because Municipalities are in competition. Whether we know it or not. Because the citizenry are watching. So when a citizen in another council says, how come our mayor can’t do this and another mayor is doing that, and then that causes that mayor to want to do it

And so there’s been a copy and paste model happening with our waste management, where people are seeking out the same partnerships. Sometimes formally coming to us, or sometimes sneaking through the window and trying to get our guys to tell us how they got it done, because they don’t want… They don’t want to be quoted. As having learned from us. But it’s quite obvious that we are changing how waste is seen and how waste management is done. There is a do-it-yourself model we’ve brought about for the first time in waste management that other councils are copying. So I would say, yes, with authority, we are changing how waste management is being dealt with in the country. But another thing that’s we are seeing is that as we experience economic growth as a country, rural areas are urbanising. With urbanisation comes, you know, increased waste and the need for waste management.

Zoë Lenkiewicz: Yeah, just that reminds me of something that you said at the beginning about as the economy develops, the amount of waste that’s being generated increases. But waste management itself is therefore vital to be able to continue that economic development, because nobody wants to invest in a place that hasn’t even got clean streets.

Mayor Talib Ahmed Bensouda: Right, so there’s a win-win with waste management. When you invest in it, you create jobs. You create an economy around waste. Because of the byproducts of that waste. You also create a cleaner environment that, you know, somebody flying in from London could say, Oh, I could invest here. So, A clean environment, even with poor infrastructure creates the perception of prosperity. Yeah. Right, so if you come to our country, even if the infrastructure is not that great, but you don’t see a single piece of paper on the ground, or a single piece of plastic, and it’s green, there’s an idea that this country is going to be prosperous, and that Hmm. Of course, makes someone want to invest. So I think there’s always going to be a win-win. If you look at areas where it’s quite built up. There’s a lot of infrastructure going on, but very dirty, a lot of dumpsites. It creates the impression of a deprived area or a place where people are not doing very well.

You know, so I would say intervening in waste management, especially at a national level, is a win-win for the economy.

Zoë Lenkiewicz: That’s great. Thank you. Yeah, I completely agree. Look, we’ve got quite a few questions here about partnerships, how you financed your system and I’d also like you if you could with your next response to tell us a bit about your Bloomberg Philanthropies Mayors Challenge award. Thank you.

Mayor Talib Ahmed Bensouda: So bad news travels very fast, but good news travels very slowly. That’s… That’s an experience. Meaning when we came in, the municipality was known as a political platform already. It was branded that way. So we had to change perceptions. So at the beginning, it was very difficult to get any partner because everybody had known the municipal council as a political institution, not serious about service delivery, not financially stable. So we had to change that perception. A new leader helps towards that, but also the first few days of pronouncements, you know, closing loopholes of corruption, you know, of course, like I met a South African minister who said catching the flag bearers of corruption and putting them on display. People who abuse the system. So. Businesses and partners were looking on and saying, oh, these guys may be different. You know now the next challenge was having one successful project that we could use. And waste management was it. You know, we advertised the expression of interest for any private sector player interested in a public-private partnership where we used a lease model. Get us the trucks over a three-year period, we’ll pay you back. And that was very difficult to get at the start, but we eventually got a player who said to me, the only reason I decided to do this is because you’re the first politician who pulled out a calculator during our conversation, you know? So… So that showed that you were serious about paying me back. So you were looking at the sustainability of the project and the feasibility of it, right? So we got that commitment of US$3 million to procure about 30 waste collection vehicles. When it started, it sort of caused others, locally and internationally to say, wait a minute, what is going on? This is unprecedented. Why is this person crazy to invest this much? So as we got more engagement, that caused projects to start coming in one at a time. So any successful project you have and it concludes successfully, Zoë would leave and rave about how well the municipality is doing or how well that partnership went. And then that gets another player interested. So over this period, with a very small municipality, I mean, relative to global standards. And of course, relatively unknown municipality within even the region. We started making a name for ourselves. And with that name, we started getting waste partners. And what I find with waste partners, they’re so passionate that when they have a successful project, they can’t stop talking about it. So, that got other partners to want to invest. We calculate that this may amount to almost US$100 million in projects that have something to do with waste. Right? So we had the Kanifing Environmental Transformation Programme, which was a €3 million EU intervention, right? So that was one of the projects that created parks that had interventions in waste management, etc. And that built a municipal radio to actually bring awareness-raising about waste management. You know, so we’ve had the German government through, I think GIZ finance a project to improve and upgrade the Bakoteh dumpsite. The initial project was about €800,000, and there was a scale-up again, which had a community element. So, the project started rolling in, and with more partners, more doors were opening. And of course, that brings us to Bloomberg. With the Bloomberg Mayors Challenge, it was quite a unique project. It’s ongoing, because although we have increased waste collection coverage from 4% to 76%, the 24% that is still left behind is significant. Right, when you’re talking about 500 tonnes of waste generated a day. That’s about 125 tonnes that is finding its way into the drainage system or to the riverine areas, or that is being burned. You know, so we came to a determination through a survey

that we got through Innovation for Development, which is also a partner who helped us with a study that built a connection between waste burning and regular waste collection. Right? And we found with that data areas that were hard to access, areas described as informal or underserved as far as development is concerned, were the areas that were generating the poorest air quality. Those were the areas that could not be accessed, and we narrowed down the problem to waste burning. So, We developed a project where we said, okay, we have a youth problem where they can’t find work and are irregularly migrating to Europe. We also have a waste problem where we are unable to collect waste from these underserved communities. So how do we bring the two together? Is there an economic plan where we could connect these young people with smaller vehicles to collect this waste for a fee, and thereby gain employment. So that brought about the Bloomberg idea. And also in that process, could we bring a better understanding in the community of the importance of sorting one’s waste, which also improves how waste is managed and how it is collected. We pitched the idea. Out of more than 600 cities, 50 were shortlisted and we were lucky to be shortlisted. And similar to this call, I had to be there with other mayors and make a pitch. And out of the 50 cities, 24 were selected. So 50 cities were given $50,000 each to pilot the project. Then out of those 50 cities, 24 were selected to win US$1 million to scale it up. What we’ve seen in the past is as we pilot projects, as we do more, there’s more partners knocking to bring a more comprehensive solution. Thus the €50 million project from the EU to bring about a landfill.

Zoë Lenkiewicz: Awesome. Thank you. So, yeah, everyone listening, look, there’s 60 people on this call. If you want to do a project in waste management, Gambia is the place to do it, right?

Mayor Talib Ahmed Bensouda: Absolutely.

Zoë Lenkiewicz: Super. Look, we’ve got 12 minutes left, and we need to save the last few minutes just for some info about the rest of the series. This has been really, really enlightening, and I’ve tried, like, there’s been a lot of questions coming into the Q&A, so I’ve tried to kind of group them and what you’ve been sharing with us has been so valuable. I think perhaps we could just have one closing question about looking ahead and about, like, in your, in your vision, what would meaningful success for waste management in Kanifing, but also in The Gambia as a whole, what would that look like in five years from now?

Mayor Talib Ahmed Bensouda: Five years from now, I believe what a success would look like is the full process in play. The full waste economy, the full circular economy. We want waste to be collected regularly. But also to be sorted. Recycled as much as possible; organic waste to be used in gardens and urban farms. And of course, you would like to see a fully engineered sanitary landfill that deals with what we cannot reuse or recycle. We would like an economy built around it that is sustainable. You know, with everything I do, I always look at the feasibility and the economic sustainability, because no project can be funded forever by grants or subsidies or support. Build the business. And, you know, in this world of capitalism, if there’s money to be made, the problem will be solved, right? So the problem with waste management is we haven’t really presented it as a business, we haven’t really structured it as income for people, right? So as much as we can get closer to that, the more we can have the problem permanently solved. As for keeping public streets clean, I see a two-pronged approach where you’re looking at holding people accountable. Bringing about systems to clean up, whether it’s waste bins or cleaners, etc. But that’s more of a governance issue rather than a business case. So a successful Kanifing, or The Gambia, in five years would have a business case around waste management and governance around, you know, waste management at the same time.

Zoë Lenkiewicz: Super. And your advice to other mayors who might be watching you now, or later on when the recording’s on YouTube, where would you recommend they start?

Mayor Talib Ahmed Bensouda: My advice to every mayor is, you know, punt it. You’re never going to get it perfect. It’s never going to be perfect. You’re going to keep tweaking and adjusting. You might actually fail. But if you don’t try, you’ll never find a solution. When we started, our model changed at least five times and it keeps evolving. Even today, we are talking about evolving the model. So it’s a living, breathing thing. But you need passionate people. The solution, more than the system, is passionate people, because even systems get outdated. Systems can fail, you know? But once you have people passionate about waste, they’re the ones who keep evolving it and use technology. I mean, now in the world of AI you don’t need to think much. You can use technology as much as you want. The world has changed dramatically. The solutions are out there, and you don’t need to reinvent the wheel. So passionate people make use of technology. Don’t be afraid to fail, just punt it.

Zoë Lenkiewicz: Fantastic words of advice. Thank you ever so much, Mayor Bensouda. It’s been wonderful having you join us and speak so openly about your experience at Kanifing. And I know how many demands there are on your time, especially in the presidential campaign period. We’re genuinely grateful that you chose to spend an hour with us. So thank you. And I’m sure everyone on the call today will join me in wishing you every success for the future. And we’ll be watching very closely. I’d also like to thank Khadija for all her help in making today’s conversation possible and Swetha and the be Waste Wise team for bringing us together. And thank you to everyone who’s joined us today. Your questions, poll responses and contributions have made this a much richer conversation. Please join me in showing our appreciation to Mayor Bensouda. Thank you so much, and then if we could just have the next slide, please, Swetha.