In most of cities in Guinea solid waste management is carried out informally and sporadically by the municipalities theme selves. In the City of Mamou the service consists of door to door collection at a few households and businesses in the city-centre and disposal at the landfill.

Thus, only 190 bins of about 50 litters are collected once or twice a month by the municipal waste management team. The city's coverage rate is less than 1% and, as a result, at least 99% of households and businesses in the city of Mamou produce tons of waste that are not properly managed and become abandoned in the streets, waterways, and gutters. This practice is not environmentally friendly and has negative effects on the standard of living.

The City Council requested UNCDF's technical and financial assistance under the INTEGRA programme for the structuring and financing of the City of Mamou Solid Waste Management Project, one of the first PPPs to utilize blended finance instruments in Guinea.

This investment is being featured by Mamadou Dian Balde.Dian is the Local Finance Initivative investment officer in Guinea and supports ongoing programs .As an important actor of this project, Dian answered to the following questions:

What made you enthusiastic about this investment?

In Guinea, the piles of garbage along the streets are an indicator of the urgency to find sustainable solutions for waste management. We visited 7 cities along the Conakry-Labé axis to identify projects and in Mamou the main arteries of the city were relatively clean compared to the other cities. As luck would have it, the project that the town hall wanted to submit to us was a solid waste management project. Decentralization in Guinea is recent, and the only real municipal election took place in 2018. This means that the municipalities do not have the skills to plan, design and implement local development projects. The State exploits this lack of technical capacity to avoid effectively transferring decentralized competencies and the associated fiscal resources. Aware of this, the Mamou City Council launched a call for proposals to recruit a private operator to manage the city's waste. Thus, UNCDF found local actors (public and private) determined to find sustainable solutions to the problem of sanitation in their city and committed to acquiring new skills. This project was a unique opportunity to develop Mamou's skills in financing and implementing local development projects and to design a replicable waste management model.

What were the challenges faced by this project?

The main characteristic of local governance in Guinea is that local elected officials are not chosen because of their skills but rather because of the private benefits they can offer to certain groups of individuals. Consequently, citizens do not expect much from elected officials. In addition, the Public-Private Partnership is a novelty in Guinea. Ensuring both social acceptability and financial viability of the project in this context was a major challenge. Furthermore, the efficiency of water and electricity fee collection is quite low in Guinea, which calls for caution in charging users of waste management services. A cost recovery mechanism and a socially acceptable tariff structure have been devised to ensure the sustainability of services. Awareness campaigns and user willingness to pay studies were conducted and a balance between affordability and incentive effect of the tariff was found. Citizens have understood the purpose of the fees they pay and have committed to paying at least $2 per month. The waste recovery component (making paving slabs from recycled plastic and compost from organic waste) means that user fees make up only 40% of the project company's revenue. Waste recovery subsidizes the collection and transportation of waste.

Another issue is the weak skills and lack of appetite for PPPs in the domestic financial sector.

What are the lessons learned from this example?

The structuring of this transaction provided a close-up view of the daily functioning of a municipality in Guinea and the constraints it faces. Considering the context of the local political economy is worth as much or more than the technical solutions provided, and this allows the technical solutions to be adapted to the context. In particular, this project deserves to be replicated in other cities in Guinea (because they all have the same constraints) and to serve as the basis for a national program to strengthen the capacities of local authorities and to put in place mechanisms for local development financing.

Given the weak capacity of local elected officials in areas related to municipal management in Guinea, it would be useful to move toward strategies that target a “city” and to transform it over 3 to 5 years. Most importantly, the city should be assisted in establishing a reliable system of tax collection, land management and local development planning, including the use of digital tools. This would lead to the construction of smart and sustainable cities in Guinea.

About Mamadou Dian:

Prior to joining UNCDF, Mr. Dian worked as an Investment Manager and advisor to the CEO of a French investment company specializing in infrastructure development in the energy and ICT sectors in Europe and Africa for 6 years.

He has experience in economic and policy advisory in France and Africa with consulting firms mandated by governments and donors, combining economic and financial tools to carry out cost-benefit analysis, value for money assessment, ex-ante and ex-post socio-economic impact assessment and regulatory impact assessment.

Dian is the LFI investment officer in Guinea and supports ongoing programs. He holds a Master of Science in Development Economics, Master of Science in Development Project Analysis, and BA. Economics.

Contact:

Mamadou.dian.balde@uncdf.org