New cleanness drive launched in Dar ahead of World clean-up day commemoration

Dar es Salaam. Tanzania’s environmental stakeholders on Saturday, September 1, 2018 launched a campaign dubbed “Let’s Do It Tanzania” which focuses on improving waste management in the Tanzanian communities.

The event, which was attended by government officials, environmental activists and entertainers took place at Coco beach in Dar es Salaam, ahead of the World Cleanup Day 2018 commemoration on September 15th.

Among others, a pavilion made of recycled plastic bottles was officially opened to serve as an information center to enhance public awareness on waste management.

The event was hosted by the Embassy of Sweden in cooperation with World Bank, Africraft, Nabaki Afrika and Nipefagio.

Addressing participants during the event, the Executive Director of a Tanzania-based public advocacy organization, ‘Nipe Fagio’ Ms Ana Rocha said there was huge potential in recycling waste particularly plastic bottles into novel building materials.

“Plastic bottles are increasingly used in construction across the World and has proved to be innovative and cost effective,” she said.

She added “Trash and Plastic pollution is today one of the greatest threats to human health and marine life. We witness it daily in Dar es Salaam where our rivers and beaches are littered with trash. To prevent the oceans from having more plastic than fish by 2050, we all need to join forces,”

The event was preceded by a jogging programme in which at least 11 jogging clubs from Kinondoni municipality participated in the event.

In order to identify areas affected by waste, Let’s do it Tanzania joins teams across the world, using the World Cleanup App to map the locations, amounts, and types of waste that needs to be cleaned up.

The App enables users to quickly map the waste in local neighborhoods, creating valuable data for scientific research, policy makers and cleanup organizers and visualizing the mismanaged waste problem.

Meanwhile, mapping champions and winners of the country wide Mapping Challenge, were announced at the event on Saturday and awarded different prizes.

Let's Do It! Tanzania is part of the Let's Do It! World, a global mass movement that began in Estonia in 2008 when 50,000 people united together to clean up the entire country in one day. Since then, Let’s Do It! has spread around the world to over 150 countries, including 42 African countries. 20 million people have so far joined to clean up illegal waste.

This global cleanup effort aims to bring together 5 percent of the global population to stand up against the global trash problem, making it the biggest positive civic action the world is yet to see.