By Menna Zayed, 2026 Africa Zero Waste Academy Participant
What if solving the waste crisis means changing the system, not simply managing the waste?
Coming from Egypt, I have seen waste in many forms. I have seen it along roadsides, in villages, around agricultural lands, and in places where communities live alongside dumpsites. I have worked around questions of environmental health, climate change, public health and community development, and over time I have come to understand that waste is never simply about what we throw away.
But I still didn’t understand how much there was left to learn. So when I travelled to Ghana to join the Africa Zero Waste Academy, I carried the five questions I had encountered through my own work and communities.
- What happens to the things we throw away?
- Who is responsible for managing them?
- Who benefits from the materials we discard?
- Who bears the health and environmental consequences when waste systems fail?
- And perhaps most importantly: What would a truly just zero-waste transition look like for African communities?
I was thinking about these questions throughout the week-long academy alongside young people working across the continent on waste, climate, and community solutions.
I did not expect these days to give me all the answers. Instead, they gave me more questions.
Travelling to Ghana was an experience in itself, and one of the most beautiful parts was the people I met along the way. Sharing a room, a meal, a bus ride, and so many conversations with amazing young people from across Africa.
Different countries, different stories, yet so much in common.
Meeting Africans beyond conferences and international reports is powerful.
You begin to see the continent through people.
Through their stories.
Through their traditions.
Through the food on the table.
Through the way people greet each other.
Through conversations about what is happening in their neighbourhoods, communities, and countries.
The Academy brought together emerging and experienced youth from across Africa. Each arrived with a different experience. Our contexts were different. But the problems often sounded familiar. From pen dumping, Plastic pollution, Limited infrastructure, Low public awareness, Weak enforcement, Health risks, the struggle to finance better systems, and communities that are often expected to live with the consequences of decisions they had little role in making.
Our waste problems may look different, but many of their roots are connected.
Learning that waste is never “just waste”
The Academy challenged the way I think about the word waste.
We use the word so casually.
We say, “throw it in the waste.”
As if something becomes worthless simply because we no longer want it. I kept coming back to a different question:
What if we stopped asking where waste should go and started asking why we are creating it in the first place?
That shift sounds simple, but it changes everything.
It shifts the conversation from collection and disposal to prevention, reuse, repair, composting, recycling, resource recovery, and circularity.
It also forces us to look at the systems behind our consumption.
- Who designed the product?
- How was it produced?
- What resources were used?
- How long will it remain useful?
- What happens when it reaches the end of its life?
- And who is expected to deal with it?
Zero waste is not simply about having cleaner streets.
It is about redesigning systems so that resources remain resources for as long as possible.
It is also about questioning a model that leaves communities to manage the consequences of endless production and consumption.
At the landfill, the conversation about waste became physical.
We could see the scale of what we were discussing.
We could smell it.
We could see the discarded materials, the environmental pressures surrounding the site, and the people whose daily realities are connected to the waste economy.
Standing there, I could not help but think about Egypt.
I thought about the communities I have encountered back home and the environmental and health questions surrounding poorly managed waste.
I thought about rural areas where burning agricultural residues can become an environmental and public-health concern.
I thought about people who live close to waste sites and often have very little power over the systems surrounding them.
The landfill was not simply a place where waste ended up.
It was evidence of decisions made much earlier in the system.
Every item there had a story before it became a waste.
And every pile of waste had consequences after it arrived.
That was difficult to ignore.
Seeing circularity in action
But Ghana didn’t just show us the problem.
It showed us what can happen when people begin to redesign the system.
Waste can be a problem. But under the right systems, it can also become a resource, an income opportunity, a source of soil improvement, and a part of a more resilient local economy.
The challenge is not simply to tell people to “recycle more.”
The challenge is to build systems that make recovery possible, accessible, economically viable, and socially just.
The people who make the system work
Perhaps one of the most powerful parts of the Academy for me was meeting the people whose work is so often invisible. Launching the Federation of Informal Sector Waste Workers Associations of Ghana (FISWWAG) was one of those moments.
Watching waste workers from different regions of Ghana come together reminded me that enormous knowledge already exists among the people working closest to waste.
They know materials, markets, what has value, and what can be recovered.
Yet waste workers are often treated as if they are outside the formal waste system. We talk about building a circular economy. But we can’t build circularity while ignoring the people who already recover materials every day.
We talk about green jobs.
But many people already do environmental work without the recognition, protection, or dignity it should come with.
We talk about a just transition.
But justice has to mean something for the person standing in front of us.
It has to mean recognition.
It has to mean safer working conditions.
It has to mean decent livelihoods.
And it has to mean that people who know the system aren’t treated as an afterthought when we redesign it.
That experience made something very clear to me:
A zero-waste future cannot be people-free.
It has to be people-centered.
Africa is not one waste story
One of the things I appreciated most about the Academy was the opportunity to listen to people from different African contexts.
It’s easy to talk about “Africa’s waste crisis” as though the continent were one place facing one problem. It is not.
- The challenges of a coastal community are not necessarily the same as those of a rural agricultural area.
- The waste composition differs.
- The infrastructure differs.
- The policies differ.
- The economies differ.
- And the solutions need to respond to those realities.
But there were also common threads.
Across our conversations, I kept seeing the same underlying themes: people, dignity, livelihoods, climate, health, policy, and community ownership.
That is what made the Academy feel bigger than a training programme. It became a space where experiences could travel.
- An idea from Ghana could spark a question about Egypt.
- A challenge from Nigeria could make someone from another country rethink their own approach.
- A solution from Kenya could inspire a conversation somewhere else.
Beyond the sessions
And then there was Ghana itself.
Some of my favourite memories happened outside the official programme.
- The long conversations during bus rides.
- The laughter after intense sessions.
- Trying new food.
- Learning things about each other’s countries.
- Listening to people’s stories outside the context of their organisations or job titles.
The most important thing about the experience is the people.
It is a community of people from across the continent.
What I brought back to Egypt
When I returned home, I realised that I had brought back a different lens.
I began thinking more carefully about the connections between:
- waste and public health
- waste and climate change
- waste and livelihoods
- waste and environmental justice
- waste and gender
- and between waste and the question of who gets to participate in shaping the solutions
For me, this matters most in rural communities.
Waste is not an isolated environmental issue when you are living in a community where agricultural burning affects air quality, where organic residues have economic potential, or where environmental degradation intersects with people’s health and livelihoods.
The waste conversation needs to broaden.
We need to ask not only, “How do we manage waste?”
But also:
- How do we prevent it?
- How do we create value from what already exists?
- How do we protect people’s health?
- How do we create decent livelihoods?
- How do we make communities part of the decision-making?
- And how do we ensure the transition itself is just?
These are the questions I want to continue carrying into my work.
I came to learn. I left wanting to do it.
A particular kind of experience stays with you after you return home.
Not because you suddenly have all the answers.
But because you can no longer look at the problem in quite the same way.
This experience gave me something more useful: a stronger understanding of how much knowledge already exists within African communities, and how much potential there is when people are given space to connect, learn and build together.
It reminded me that solutions do not always need to be imported.
Sometimes they are already there.
- In a community’s knowledge.
- In a young person’s idea.
- In a composting initiative.
- In people coming together to say that the system can be different.
And perhaps this is what I will remember most from Ghana:
Waste is not only about what we throw away.
It is about what we choose to value.
We decide what is disposable.
We decide whose work is visible.
We decide which materials have value.
We decide whose knowledge is included.
And we decide what kind of systems we are willing to build.
The Africa Zero Waste Academy ended, but the conversations did not.
And the relationships certainly did not.
From Ghana back to Egypt, I carry new perspectives, new friendships, new questions, and a renewed commitment to connecting environmental action with the realities of people’s lives.
Because ultimately, zero waste is not only about waste.
It is about people, resources, health, dignity, livelihoods and the kind of future we choose to create.
And across Africa, that future is already being built in communities, by youth, and by people who refuse to accept that the systems we inherited are the only systems possible.
The experience gave us space to learn from one another and turn what we learned into action.
Writer’s Bio
Menna Zayed is a public health and environmental researcher, clinical and development practitioner, and youth advocate working at the intersection of environmental health, climate action, community engagement, science, and policy. She actively engages in youth climate and environmental initiatives across Egypt, Africa, the Arab region, and international climate spaces, and is passionate about strengthening connections among community knowledge, environmental action, and public health.
