Ghana does not need to be saved from its waste. It is already solving the problem
THERE is a version of the global waste story which is often presented in a way that portrays the Global South as the main problem to be addressed. This is highlighted by a map of the world dotted with overflowing landfills and rivers choked with plastic. Ghana has spent years inside that story, photographed at Agbogbloshie, measured in landfill tonnage, and cited in reports about inadequate collection and disposal infrastructure.
But in a repurposed crematorium in La, a neighbourhood of Accra, something else has been happening. Mama Esther, a food vendor, has been separating her plantain, yam, and potato scraps and handing them to a team that turns them into compost. Mr Boadi, a farmer, has been watching his lettuce grow faster than it ever has before. Kwabena Akanzibe, a waste picker, has been earning a steadier income and learning skills that the formal economy once told him he would never need and would never have. These are the textures of what a community-led transition actually looks like, a set of practices, communities, and systems that have been working quietly, advancing solutions that are practical and grounded in locally lived realities.
Last month, the UN named Accra/Ghana, among 20 cities and countries, moving towards zero waste on International Zero Waste Day. These recognitions point to what the Zero Waste Cities Project, led by the Green Africa Youth Organisation (GAYO) and its implementing partners, are doing across the city of Accra. The Zero Waste project, implemented since 2021, has diverted over 65 tonnes of organic waste annually from landfills, pulled over 288 tonnes of plastic from coastal and urban environments, delivered compost to 120 farmers, and placed over 100 young people in green enterprises.
Food waste is a climate failure and a fixable one
This year’s UN Zero Waste Day theme is food waste, and the choice of the theme feels per the feasibility of utilising organic waste to produce compost and reduce over-reliance on chemical fertilizer. “My harvests are bigger than I ever thought possible,” he said. “The compost works like magic. In just two weeks, my lettuce grew so healthily, I am surprised.”
sonal for a country where food means everything. Food waste in Ghana is not only an abstraction of supermarkets over-ordering; the real impacts are felt when market produce does not sell, to kitchen scraps in dense neighbourhoods, to organic matter that ends up buried in dumps and pumps methane into the atmosphere. According to the Accra Metropolitan Assembly, Accra generates approximately 3,000 metric tonnes of waste every day, with organics making up nearly half of that stream. What the project demonstrated is that these resources are being wasted.
When organic matter rots in a landfill or burns in an open dump, it releases methane, a short-lived but devastating climate pollutant that, according to the IPCC, traps 82.5 times as much heat as CO over 20 years. The waste sector is the third-largest source of methane emissions globally, and it is growing. The good news, buried in that alarming fact, is that waste separation and composting alone can cut landfill methane by 62%. The solution exists, and it is already working in La Dade Kotopon municipality.
The people the system cannot work without
The Zero Waste Cities project’s composting work stream ran a decentralised system anchored at a Material Recovery Facility in La Dade Kotopon. More than 200 bags of compost were produced in 2025 from urban organic waste and distributed to farmers in Korle Bu, Burma Camp, and Airport Junction, cutting their dependence on chemical fertilisers. For Mr Boadi, who received that compost, the result was not only incremental, it also demonstrated the feasibility of utilising organic waste to produce compost and reduce over-reliance on chemical fertilizer.
The project also trained 57 waste workers as environmental champions, achieving a 92 per cent improvement in knowledge and awareness of methane mitigation practices. It deployed 150 air quality monitors across 29 municipal assemblies, generating the kind of environmental data that many of these areas had never seen before. It mobilised 443 participants in clean-up campaigns. It convened a Clean Air Conference attended by more than 150 stakeholders. It reached over 20,657 residents through awareness campaigns. These are early architectures of a data-driven air quality governance system in a city that has lacked one.
Four hundred and forty-three (443) participants took part in clean-up campaigns that collected over two metric tonnes of plastic from coastal and urban environments. That is not a large number against the scale of the problem. What it represents is a model that works at the community scale and is being replicated across other municipalities.
When we talk about waste management, the focus often falls on bins, trucks, and recycling plants, but the reality is that the system cannot function without the hands and knowledge of informal waste workers. These are the people who sort, collect, and recover materials discarded by households and businesses, often under hazardous conditions and without formal recognition or social protection.
“Ghana does not need to be saved from its waste. It needs the investment to run with what it has already started.
initially by the UMI Fund and then with further support from UNDP, the Global Methane Hub, Clean Air Fund, and the Earthshot Prize, with technical support from GAIA and the GLOW.
formal recognition or social protection. They are the invisible backbone of urban waste systems, turning what society deems worthless into resources that feed circular economies. Yet, despite their essential role, informal waste workers are frequently marginalised, underpaid, and excluded from planning and policy decisions, even as cities rely on their expertise to keep streets clean, reduce landfill loads, and recover valuable materials. Recognizing this, GAYO is championing the unionisation of waste workers across Ghana, supporting them to organise for better pay, safer working conditions, access to benefits, and a stronger voice in shaping the very systems they sustain. A sustainable waste system must acknowledge, support, and integrate these workers not just as labourers; it must recognize them as vital partners in building cleaner, greener, and more inclusive cities.
The finance gap nobody wants to talk about
Only one per cent of global methane finance goes to organic management. The other 99 per cent flows to waste-to-energy incineration, a technology that is expensive to import, difficult to maintain, and profitable mainly for a small number of private operators with no particular interest in the communities near their facilities.
The waste sector overall receives USD 6.1 billion in climate finance, compared to US$ 7.5 billion for agriculture and US$ 10.6 billion for fossil fuels, despite having an annual methane abatement potential of 22 million metric tonnes by 2030. The Zero Waste Cities Project was funded
The project also produced the Zero Waste Playbook, co-created and validated with 46 multi-sector stakeholders from municipalities, civil society, academia, and the private sector. This is a practical implementation guide that municipal assemblies can use without external consultants. It is already used, as five municipal assemblies in Ghana formally adopted it during the project period.
Who is actually doing the work?
The Zero Waste Cities Project is led by GAYO, a youth-led African organisation, in partnership with municipal assemblies and a range of civil society groups, universities (including KNUST and the University of Ghana), private sector partners, and informal waste worker associations, including the Green Waste Pickers Cooperative and the Borla Taxi and Tricycle Association. This matters because it runs directly counter to the assumption, built into a lot of development finance structures that technical solutions need to be imported.
#ThisIsZeroWaste
GAIA’s campaign theme this year pushes back against the idea that zero waste is a concept that belongs to wealthy cities with sophisticated infrastructure. Zero waste is 120 farmers in Accra getting compost instead of chemical fertilizer. It is a waste picker with a path to formal recognition and inclusion in city waste management plans; it is Mama Esther saving money on disposal and understanding, for the first time, why what she throws away matters. It is a 23-year-old who trained as a youth ecopreneur and now runs a small recycling enterprise. It is 150 air quality monitors generating data that municipal officials can actually use. Most of it required a decision to invest in the people and systems already there.
Ghana does not need to be saved from its waste. It needs the investment to run with what it has already started.
BY FATHIA SELASI CHARWAY-GLOVER
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