Juba to clean up its act, thanks to 16,000-strong garbage team

Just half a decade into a tenuous peace, towns in Southern Sudan, including the regional capital Juba, are experiencing a malady all too common to the rest of the region — garbage.

Next month, an estimated 16,000 volunteers will take to the streets of Juba in a Unep-coordinated effort to raise awareness on the health benefits of effective waste disposal at the domestic level.

The event will also see the establishment of a sustainable waste management capacity at the urban level.

Juba has in the recent past experienced fatal outbreaks of cholera, other water-borne diseases and malaria.

The city’s scheduled clean-up is part of a $35 million project to improve the sustainable use of natural resources in the sub-region.

The project will be coordinated by Unep over the next three years.

“It’s just the beginning of an important clean-up that will have concrete and positive impacts on the population of southern Sudan.

“It also takes forward Unep’s collaboration with Sudan to improve environmental management as a critical prerequisite to sustainable development,” said Unep executive director Achim Steiner in a statement issued at the organisation’s headquarters in Nairobi.

Mr Steiner said the clean-up will be replicated in the nine states of southern Sudan, and will be coupled with a sustained awareness campaign.

Unep, which established offices in Juba recently, will also provide technical support to the regional government to manage its forests and other natural resources in a sustainable manner.

These efforts aim at forestalling the trajectories most cities in the region have taken, which have resulted in the mushrooming of informal settlements, pollution of rivers and other waterways, and encroachment of wetlands.

After a peace agreement in 2005 ended two decades of war between the government in Khartoum and southern Sudanese rebels, Unep conducted a post-conflict environmental assessment.

It made 85 recommendations and outlined a detailed $120-million action plan over three to five years.

Among the most pernicious polluters in East Africa, which Unep would like cities like Juba to avoid, are thin polythene bags.

Only Rwanda in East Africa has rid itself of the pollutants, with a ban in Kenya being suspended soon after it was announced two years ago.