Àrea Metropolitana de Barcelona

The Greater Banjul Metropolitan Area is made up of the City of Banjul (BCC), Kanifing Municipal Council (KMC) and Brikama (BAC), and is home to almost two-thirds of the Gambian population, with a high level of urban density. In this context, waste management is a major challenge for the territory, where the difficulties include the lack of regular waste collection, open-air burning of waste, and uncontrolled landfills with serious socio-environmental impacts. There are also other associated challenges, such as low levels of training and experience among the waste management teams and a lack of municipal funding for the waste management sector, as well as limited public awareness of the issue.

This situation has serious consequences for the inhabitants of the Greater Banjul metropolitan area in terms of the incidence of diseases, sanitation issues, the loss of public spaces for its citizens and a lack of resources to reduce pollution levels, leading to violations of the right to health, the right to a healthy environment and the right to the city.

The three municipalities that make up the Greater Banjul metropolitan area (Banjul, Brikama and Kanifing) are working with Mbolo and Barcelona Metropolitan Area to improve municipal waste management based on strategies with reduced technological costs which are aligned with climate change mitigation. The following four areas are being worked on:

• Enhancing the skills of policymakers (local and national), technical staff (in the environment and health departments of the three municipalities) and service staff (collection workers), as well as environmental educators and management committees of the five markets in the Greater Banjul metropolitan area, in waste management, and the organic fraction of municipal waste (OFMW) in particular.
• Diagnosis of the generation and composition of waste in five markets, and study of the logistics of the collection and treatment of OFMW for composting.
• Awareness-raising among strategic groups: students in the three implementing municipalities, 1,793 vendors and customers in the five markets, and citizens. Work is being undertaken with awareness-raising and environmental education materials, with environmental educators from youth groups.
• Cooperation in a study of the landfill: analysis of the feasibility of managing non-OFMW waste for disposal in a controlled landfill in the Greater Banjul metropolitan area.