Waste management, a challenge for Cameroonian cities
Household solid waste is a challenge for vulnerable cities in Africa. The continent has held the sad record since 2015, home to 16 of the 25 dirtiest cities in the world. Many cities cannot keep up and are crumbling under mountains of rubbish. Several causes for this: the absence of strategic planning, the lack of resources, the incivism of the populations who make no effort to make their daily living spaces clean, the difficulties of the concessionary companies in the execution of the contract. '' garbage collection with public authorities, etc. In Cameroon, in addition to the delays in payments for the service, the Hygiène et salubrite du Cameroun (HYSACAM) company deplores the loss of more than 3,000 garbage bins intended for waste collection. Consequences, piling up of rubbish, recurring smoke, foul odors, more and more rats, cockroaches, mosquitoes and flies thriving around illegal dumps, contamination of water resources, land, increased air pollution, and proliferation of diseases (respiratory, malaria, cholera, etc.). As solutions, it is important that the authorities in charge of cities change paradigm and no longer consider rubbish as material without any value, but as a resource to be valued in order to derive economic and health benefits useful for all. Moreover, with decentralization, the collection of garbage as well as its treatment will certainly be opened up to competition, which will better resolve the problem of unsanitary conditions in our cities. The establishment of a waste pre-collection system is recommended.
