 Alright thank you, thank you very much for the invitation also to UNU wider, let's talk trash. As a trash is probably one of those, you know, packs of life together with taxes and death. Everyone produces trash, it's impossible not to produce trash. It's a, there are some some environmentalists advocate for a zero waste society, it's impossible. There's some, because of the law of physics, trash is inevitable. So, as Ivan said, the urbanization is proceeding at a fast pace in Africa. So, and one of the waste management, one of the worst problems, one of the most pressing environmental problems in Africa, especially South Saharan Africa, and it's a neglective, in many cases a non-issue. It gets not a lot of attention from policymakers or even from researchers. And there's also an interesting that I call North-South Continental Divide. I'll talk briefly more about this. So, we can focus here on, these are the latest UN population projections. As you can see here, the urban population in Africa between now and 2050 is going to increase by 851 million people. So, it's less than in Asia, you know, in Asia almost 1.4 million people will add to the urban population. But in Africa both, it's the only major region with both the urban and the rural population are going to increase significantly. And the more people there are, the more waste that is generated. And not only that, but also economic growth also wealthier people generate more waste than poor people. So, the combination of more people in urban areas and wealthier are going to increase significantly the amount of waste that needs to be managed. As you might expect, the higher the income of a country, the better off it is in terms of waste management. As you can see the developed countries basically collect the totality of the waste that they generate and they give 100% proper disposal. As you, middle income are in the middle, as also in terms of waste collection collects like 60% and disposes about 30% of their waste properly. But low income in South Saharan Africa would be in this category only collect only 40% of the waste that they generate and the final proper disposal only 5% of the waste. So, it's a serious problem. And we can see here now by region, OECD mostly developed countries collect 97% of the waste. The Middle East and North Africa collect 85%. This is the highest collection rate in the developing world. But when you see South Saharan Africa has the lowest collection rate. This is what I meant by North, South, divide within Africa. North Africa is relatively better off in terms of collection and management. And South of the Sahara is struggling, is the most, the region that is struggling the most in the developing world. And we can see here in terms of projections in terms of population, this is based on World Bank data. So between 2010 and 2025 the urban population is basically going to double. This is the urban population in blue. It's going to double. But the waste generation roughly is almost going to triple. Going to triple. Because there's wealthier people and more the combination of population and economic growth is going to triple the generation of waste. So in this insufficient waste collection inadequate disposal presents several problems. One of the main ones is that it creates air, water and land pollution and affects the human health and the environment. Also many cities in the continent today are unable to provide this management services. So if they cannot provide the service now, what is going to happen within 10, 20, or 30 years is going to be a serious, serious problem. So also a common is that they use inappropriate technologies. Many cities throughout, especially in South Saharan Africa, they believe that the solution to the waste problems is the use of more technology like they use in Europe or Japan and the US. And sometimes it's completely inappropriate to the conditions, to the African conditions. And as I mentioned, this was intended in the near future. Just an example, I was sincerely on a couple of a few weeks ago. And you can see this all over the place. In the free town, the capital, you can see garbage trash all over the place. The municipality collects about 38% of the waste. So there's trash all over the place. And also there's not a single sanitary landfill in the entire country. So all the trash, the trash that is collected is sent to open dumps like this. You can see the open dump. This is a free town. There are two main open dumps there. And you can see here the open dump basically is surrounded, surrounded by, I think these settlements are informal. I think they are slum areas because the land around the dumps is undesirable. So sometimes it's free or cheap to live there. But it obviously has a serious impact on their health. So the informal waste sector, or IWS, the World Bank estimates about 1% of the urban population in the developing world survive by collecting, managing, processing waste. And so that is about 15 million people worldwide. And this will be about 2.5 million in Africa. So and with an economic impact of billions of billions of dollars, the informal waste sector of people having traditionally poor, ignored, exploited or repressed. And there are four main categories in this IWS. The first one is scavengers or waste speakers. The second one informal waste collectors. The third one manufacturing with waste material. People make stuff from consumer products and a provision of services. So the IWS workers are one of the most vulnerable segments of the population. They are recent migrants from rural areas or even from some other countries. They are usually unemployed, widows that lost their husbands and they have no other way, no other means to support themselves or their children. A lot of people disabled, elderly and even children. A child labor is really common in this sector. So evidence, experience in Africa and in other regions in Asia and Latin America has shown that when the IWS is supported, it can create jobs, reduce poverty, supply and expensive materials to industry and thus improving its competitiveness and it can also reduce pollution. Recycling materials reduces pollution. It also conserves natural resources instead of consuming virgin resources by reducing and recovering a more circular economy. It can conserve natural resources. It can also save cities in the collection and disposal of waste. In some cases it's really impressive. In some places like Indonesia, the scavengers recover 30 percent of the waste. So that reduces 30 percent the collection costs and disposal to the municipalities. And it can also reduce greenhouse emissions because by recycling paper, glass, metals and so forth, it requires less energy than using virgin materials and also by composting organic waste also reduces methane. So and yet despite that it can have social, economic and environmental benefits in the IWS activities are illegal in most African countries. So there is not a single country where there is their promotion activities to help this sector, not a single country. So there are no government policies, no programs linking the IWS to poverty, which there are definitely linkages. It can reduce poverty. It can be reduced to waste management and green growth. It's an open area. There's no country has done that. So in terms of more specifically, take about Africa, there are some, the IWS in Africa is very active as in other regions. There are grassroots efforts to make a living and satisfy a social need. There are also people with a lot of very active entrepreneurial activity. They want to invest their own resources to satisfy a social need. In some cases, they provide, there is need for these activities. So they satisfy the other people's needs for these services and materials. And also they also tend to use appropriate technologies. I'll show one example of this. So this is the way it is done. This is in Lagos, Nigeria. So a collection of waste happens all over the cities. And public spaces in cities and streets of the streets, like you see here, this person collecting cardboard. The use of pushcards is also very, very common, like here. And this person collecting, I think these are cardboard tubes. So anything that has a value, they'll recover it. And this is the way the scavenger community lives near the main dump in Lagos, Nigeria. You can see the conditions. And this is the main dump near Nairobi. You can see, obviously, this is one of the main ways in which people recover waste around the dumps. You can see here that these people basically live, well, in some cases live around the dumps, but they work in these conditions. You can see some smoke and sometimes a lot of flies and emanations or toxic emanations. It's impressive in some places. So briefly, I'll talk about now South Africa. There scavengers are popular, known as salvagers or reclaimers. They are traditionally black before and after the appetite. And despite the official government policy of black economic empowerment, basically they have been ignored in national policies or they are not even mentioned in any legislation or national programs. And some of that is worrying, a trend that is worrying, is that many cities are starting to sell their right to recover recyclables to private companies. So instead of supporting the grassroots efforts, instead of supporting the waste pickers or the salvagers, they are giving the potential benefit to companies, the private companies. So there's a risk that instead of promoting grassroots development, they are helping, you know, instead of helping develop the grassroots groups, they will benefit the better off, the people that are already better off. So there are three municipalities that are very interesting. The first one, they banned scavenging in the local landfill. And this had, as you can see, these scavengers still stick into the landfill at certain areas. They can only do it for a couple of hours a day. And you can see there, that reduced the repression policy from the municipality reduced their income by 80%. So before they could even send their children to school, they were earning a decent income. And now they're struggling because of the repressive government policy. The second one, and Metzimaholo Municipality, they allow scavengers but they are forced to sell them to a black economic empowerment company. Two black professionals form this company and now they have the right to all the scavengers in the municipality have to sell to them. So instead of, as before in the upper state, they would be able to, instead of having white masters, now they would have black masters. So, but still their result could be the same. Exploitation and lack of opportunities. The third one, they are trying to incorporate the informal waste sector workers but they are not part of the process. So they are there as having some protection measurements but there are no promotion, no promotion activities. They're not part of the of the decision-making process. And now let's go to Tunisia also. And this is a very interesting program. The EcoLeft program was funded in 1997. It's a national program for the recovery of post-consumer packaging. So trash containers. And they initially signed a contract with two private companies. And these private companies put containers throughout the countries, throughout the country, so that people on a voluntary basis just put the containers there, you know, like the plastic bottles or any other containers they could put in the, in the, right, thank you. But this resulted in high collection costs. People just didn't care. They just didn't put the trash in their containers. So the government changed, had to change an approach and decided to pay people by kilo, by the kilo of the material. So this of course encouraged all the scavengers to create, provided opportunities for about 11,000 poor individuals who are now better off created micro enterprises in this increased, increased the volume and reduced collection costs. So the incorporation of the IWS can be beneficial. This is just one person collecting some stuff. In Egypt, Egypt is in Cairo, they manage about 60% of the city's waste. And they recycle 80% of each ton that they collect. This is one of the highest recycling rates in the world. And despite this, the government has never been supportive. In 2002, the government awarded contracts to private companies to collect waste. And seven years later, the government had to admit that it has been a failure, that despite those private companies, the service was worse than seven years before. So the privatization did not work. And also in 2009, the government ordered all pigs killed because the pigs consumed all the organic waste, food leftovers and so forth. And because of flu fears, there was not a single case of flu. So it flew in the country. And yet the government ordered all pigs to be killed. And today because of that, because there are no pigs to eat the organic food, now in Cairo, you can see organic waste all over the place. And here are some that used to be a collection, used to be done using the government ban, the donkey carts. Then the IWS workers invested or got loans to buy trucks. Now they use mostly these trucks for collection. They do sorting. And as you can see here, they're sorting plastics and they manufacture products from the waste that they that they recover. They also make all kinds of consumer products like rugs, quilts, you can see here, clothes. All of this is from recover waste and paper. They also recycle paper. So in terms of income, obviously poverty is multi-dimensional. Here, I'm only, I'm only talking about income. And you can see here, even when they're not organized, when waste figures are not organized, like in Manila or in Delhi, they earn, they can earn more, more than the poverty line. As you can see here, the Cairo, the ones that I showed, this is when they combine waste collection and recycling. So it can be lucrative when they combine waste collection and recycling. And this here, this tomb, these people in Mexico and this municipality, they also combine waste collection and recycling. And here, the highest in, in this in Mexico, these two cities in Mexico is when they combine, when they do separation, recovery of recyclables separated of the source. This is, they can be highly productive. I don't have a lot of time to talk about this, but basically Africa can learn. There's no need to reinvent the wheel. There's a lot of, a lot of experience in Asia and in Latin America. Right now there's already legal recognition and national programs for, for the IWS workers in Brazil, Colombia, India, Indonesia, and the Philippines. And there's the efforts to get organized, to get supported policies are more advanced in Latin America. The World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank now support the integration and working with, with the IWS. And I will show briefly there's, well, more than a thousand worker cooperatives in South America. And Brazil is the most advanced country in terms of working with the IWS and the government supporting their activities. You can see here, there's, there's, they have a national movement of waste speakers. They organize national march, marches. And because of that, the educational campaign to the education society and policymakers. And here, this is a former president, Lula da Silva. Brazil is the only country in the world where the president met regularly with the waste speakers. That shows the personal commitment of the, of the, of the president. So, well, I'll skip this. So there are opportunities for creating PPPs, including the informal sector like this in, in Colombia, Bogota, for waste collection. Recycling plant, also with the waste speakers. Housing units, there are some, I don't have the before, the way, the before, the housing where they belong before, but this is the after. Okay. In terms of conclusions, so Africa will face significant challenges in the waste management in the coming decades. It's going to, it's time to become worse. But the IWC can render social economic and environmental benefits. The IWC can be part of the solution. And the, but if the development potential is, is harnessed by appropriate policies. And finally, Africa can learn, as I showed, can learn the lessons, the lessons learned and best practices from Asia and from Latin America. So there are solutions already. There are models that are working. So Africa just needs to, to learn from the other, even from within, from within Africa. There are, there are already some lessons as I showed from Tunisia and Cairo. And some of the lessons that are being learned in, in South Africa. So if you want to, when I get a little, when I get a little more about this, you can read my book that I, I wrote a couple of weeks ago, like years, years ago, a couple of years ago. Well, thank you.