Micro-enterprise development for primary collection

Urban governments in many developing countries are facing serious problems with the management of solid waste. Service quality is generally poor, and costs are spiralling, often with no effective mechanisms for improved cost recovery. Two key alternatives to the present impasse are currently favoured: decentralized approaches and privatization. This paper proposed to identify and explore findings about the development of micro-enterprise for primary collection, working from a thorough understanding of existing systems and practices and to locate those in a broader framework of private solutions for solid waste management. The main hypothesis of the paper is that moves towards privatisation of primary solid waste collection should be designed from a thorough understanding of the complex interactions between a wide range of existing actors. A secondary hypothesis is that involvement of existing sweepers will improve the efficiency of primary collection. The paper is an output from a DFID funded research commenced in April, 1996 and data and information has been collected from three cities of South Asia.