By Wudasse Berhanu, Technical Expert, UNDP Ethiopia accelerator lab

Sprawling on the shores of lake Tana, Bahir Dar has a unique tie with the environment and tries to integrate sustainability into its urban development interventions. As a rapidly growing capital of the Amhara Regional State in Ethiopia, the city is faced with many urbanisation challenges like many cities across the country and Africa. The city limits are expanding, creating new neighbourhoods to accommodate the growing population, which doubled to almost 400,000 between 2014 and 2019.

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This growth in population puts pressure on public services to keep up with the growing demand with the limited resources available. One such service is waste management. So, when the chance came for the city to participate in the Multi City Challenge (MCC) Africa, the city administration jumped on the opportunity to engage in open innovation.

The city provides door-to-door waste collection for households once a week by outsourcing the collection to private companies and associations. Business and commercial centers get waste pick-up services based on their need from once a week to as much as once a day. While the current waste collection covers the majority of the city, when new neighbourhoods are built, they don’t always have the road infrastructure to allow waste collectors access, even if there were enough staff to cover the new developments. These neighbourhoods might only get services once a month, especially in the rainy season where access is difficult.

However, the solution for such challenges is not always simple. Waste management is a complex system that is greatly affected by limited resources and lack of priority in Bahir Dar, as it is across many cities in Ethiopia. It requires a system thinking approach that can address the driving factors that limit the efficiency of the current system. So, the city was interested to go beyond the common expert-led problem solving approach to address these challenges.

With the support of UNDP Ethiopia through its NAMA COMPOST project and the Accelerator Lab, the city administration embarked on the journey of open innovation through the Multi City Challenge which combines a public-facing challenge, with problem definition training for city officials.

Here are some of the things we learned throughout this process.

Why is data important?

Our approach began with an iterative problem definition process that dug deep into the core problems within waste management in the city to actively identify and validate our assumptions. Previously, we would have relied on expert knowledge to outline the issues.

__It also highlighted the importance of collaborative problem solving in the public sector, as many challenges are part of and are affected by complex social, economic, and political systems requiring multi-sectoral solutions. __

However, this time there was a focus on using data to not just structure but validate the problem as being true. This process not only showed us the importance of taking action, but also highlighted the gap in the data that is available on waste management in the city. It showed us that we need to be rigorous in going beyond measuring how much and what type of waste is generated. We need to understand the role of the informal waste systems, the barriers to building a reusing and recycling value chain, and the ways waste affects the agricultural and ecological systems nearby. We saw that data is key not only in measuring impact but in decision making on what to solve, how to solve it and why it is important.

Who owns solutions?

It is very common in development and government to think that we are the sources of solutions and in effect the owners. But the MCC process highlights the need to incorporate citizens not just as recipients but as designers of the solution, and as active participants in the implementation process. Citizens have first-hand knowledge of the challenges they face, so they are a great source when trying to understand the problem, but their proximity to the challenge also means that they might already have solved the problem in some capacity or have ideas on how to solve them. Therefore, the Multi City Challenge platform has introduced a new active role for citizens that we are taking advantage of.

Piloting or experimenting?

When we reach solutions that we think will work, we want to build pilots and roll outs that are time- and resource-intensive. In their place, we look at small scale experimentations that require limited resources to make sure we are addressing the right issues before we invest. For Bahir Dar, resource limitation is a challenge when it comes to waste management. Being able to have an agile testing process that doesn't require a lot of time and effort means that if the solution works, we will have results with which to request funding. This is a huge advantage especially when we must compete with multiple priorities in city government.

Through the five-month journey, Multi City Challenge gave us a one-of-a-kind opportunity to network with other African cities including Accra and Kano on issues in waste management. Even though we are on different sides of the continent, our cities face common challenges around urbanisation that we can exchange learnings on. It also highlighted the importance of collaborative problem solving in the public sector, as many challenges are part of and are affected by complex social, economic, and political systems requiring multi-sectoral solutions. The stakeholders we reached out to during our problem definition process have now become our collaborators. In this respect, as we plan to launch our experiment on community-based waste management through the Accelerator Labs portfolio on urban solid waste management, we are seeking the active engagement of the community in contextualising the ideas and planning the experiment in ways that work for their context.

We are using this opportunity to solve a common but small part of a system that can be replicated in other cities in Ethiopia. Scaling solutions is not easy, especially for complex systems like waste management. However, by concentrating on a specific aspect — waste management in hard-to-reach neighbourhoods — we are experimenting not just with ideas, but a problem-solving approach that other cities can adopt. We are excited to embark on the second phase of this journey and look forward to sharing our learnings in the future. — Wudasse Berhanu

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