Lilongwe District Commissioner Lawford Palani has hailed the Lilongwe Shift youth group and Wind Ride Aeros (WRA) for coming up with the waste management initiative campaign and data recording waste in Lilongwe markets.
Speaking during the data disseminating workshop on drone technology in Lilongwe on Thursday Palani said they really appreciate the effort that has been done by the Shift and WRA to make sure that they are complementing the government effort because of the present launch of the screen-up campaign and councils are encouraged to make sure that they are cleaning the waste in their markets.
He said waste management is a challenge due to they have a lot of markets all over the city of Lilongwe and the population is very high.
He said: “A lot of people are not aware of how best can they help in terms of removing the waste, they dump the waste but they don’t have time to manage it, so it is a problem in Lilongwe.
“We really appreciate what they are doing by helping us, especially the Chinsapo market which they sensitize the people, giving them an awareness campaign and for us is a plus, and are happy with the work that they are doing.”
Palani added that they have an environmental department that has a budget geared to make sure that they clean and manage the waste in Lilongwe.
In his remarks, one of the Shift group members Uppeh Assedi said they went to the Chinsapo market because it’s their model site to map the area and to know how the waste situation is in the market so that they can be able to collect the data which will influence them to come up with the decisions on how they can go forward towards the market.
He further said that their findings show that the residents are very poor when it comes to waste disposal saying that based on the findings they are able now to see how best they can move forward towards their next step.
On his part Wind Ride Aeros (WRA) Co-founder and chief executive officer Moses Fuleya said the Shifters are driven by a passion to make change with regards to proper waste management and the drone technology is coming up to generate evidence of old data that will help them in decision making on proper waste management.
Fuleya said they started with the Chinsapo market because their target is to enhance proper waste management in all city markets through collecting data using drone technology.
The Shift group is the youth advocacy campaign working in partnership with RAW which generates data using drones and uses it to lobby on proper waste management.
The waste management awareness initiative campaign was funded by Save the Children.
