What Project Would A Laptop Help You With?

Waste Management and Recycling System for Dalaba.

Short Description Of Project

Like every city in Guinea, West Africa, Dalaba does not have a functional waste management system to take care of the trash that litters streets, forests, rivers and gardens. There are no trashcans or dumpsters, thus the population’s current method of handling waste is either throwing it into nature or burning it, eliciting toxic fumes or seeping deadly material into the earth’s soil for nearby plants to drink and people to later consume.

To address this serious problem, a dynamic youth group has been working diligently for the past year with a Peace Corps Volunteer, along with several other community members to create a comprehensive waste management system. The system will incorporate composting organic material and sorting and selling plastic to a recycling company in the capital city. Both of these activities, along with collecting a small weekly tax from the population, will pay the wages of the workers, who will empty the 106 publicly installed trashcans each day with two motorcycle-carriers. The workers will also manage the trash sorting and compost activities, ultimately creating a system that will be sustainable and self-reliant after the grant finishes.

The goal in this project is to render Dalaba clean, safe and healthy for not only the environment, but most importantly, for the population. Depending on the outcome of the pilot phase in this project, the association of youth hopes to grow the scope in manageable doses, potentially to the level of household collect.

How Would A Laptop Help You?

To assist in the financial management and sustainability of this project, a laptop would be given to these youth to keep track of expenses related to materials, labor, fuel, etc. It would be used to also track data on how the pilot project is functioning – how much trash is collected each week, sales of compost and plastic, what difficulties are encountered, and so forth. Detailed notes and tracking will be critical to not only the success of this project, but also to its transparency and accountability for the community. Moreover, it will be critically important to have this data in case the project does not succeed, to help any secondary measures in their planning processes.

What Languages do you speak?

French and Pular