Yo-Waste Mobile Application - Makerere University

According to the Waste Management Outlook (WMO) for Africa, only 4% of waste generated in Africa is being collected and recycled, placing it far from the AU’s vision that African cities will be recycling at least 50% of the waste they generate by 2023 for reuse.

To help city authorities & local waste haulers maximize collections of waste in Africa, Yo-waste is developing a mobile application that will help increase garbage collections from households by connecting these places to nearby garbage collection trucks.

The platform connects garbage generators to local waste haulers and haulers to recycling collection places to create an efficient recycling system which has not been the case with the traditional collection systems.

Solid waste collection and garbage management are one of the key services provided by the Kampala City Council Authority (KCCA) in Uganda. KCCA contracts private companies to manage solid waste collection so as to improve the cleanliness of the city. It is estimated that the per capita generation of garbage is one kilogram per day. With a population of about 1.5 million, this works out to about 1500 tons.

The council can only manage to dispose of 40 - 50% of this. These statistics imply that at least 900 tons are left uncollected. These statistics are related to many urban communities in many developing countries. It's this uncollected garbage that ends up in drainage channels, is burned in the open, and when left to decompose attracts breeding pests and animals, thus causing more environmental hazards and potential health problem

Yo-waste is primarily designed for urban communities such as cities and municipalities. Our target market includes residential homes in urban places, small businesses, smart city projects, estates and city surbubs.

Currently, we are piloting with 2 densely populated areas in kampala e.g kawempe and kajjansi to help us improve our product.

Yo-waste is has got a range of three platforms for different waste management players

Yo-Waste Connect - Android mobile application that allows households & homes to request and schedule for garbage collection services on their smartphones.

Yo-Waste Hauler - Android mobile application that provides sophisticated routing and logistics features to garbage collection trucks. The application allows collectors to maximize garbage collection points while navigating around the city

Yo-Waste Cloud - Cloud based platform that allows garbage collection companies & municipal authorities to measure the productivity of garbage collection trucks in the field. Users can track garbage collection trucks in real time, serviced locations and jobs in progress.

All these platforms work hand in hand to make the whole process of garbage collection effective.

Our business model focusses on engaging many households in developing countries to divert more wastes from landfills to recycling.

Similar solutions like ours exist, like in united states there is rubicon global. In East Africa, where we launching particularly Uganda, there is no solution of the kind. 

The current competition at the same time we partner with, in Uganda, is the traditional garbage collection companies, the competitive edge we bringing on board is we are organizing the market such that at least all households can be serviced.

We use the android mobile application to provide sophisticated routing and logistics tools for our waste hauler partners to allow them effectively collect waste from small businesses and dump it at collection/sorting points.

One of the biggest challenges in collection of waste in Uganda is lack of efficiency in the existing mechanism, which relies on paper and guess work to map out customers to be serviced on a given that. Our solution does all this in no minute and provides well planed routes for serviceable location for our partner with waste haulers. Our technology is bringing about efficiency in the system.

Current number = 100 households

In one year = 1000 households

In 5 years = 100,000 households

We plan to divert thousands of tonnes of waste dumped in landfills and bring it back to market to boast local production capacity and create more jobs in the Uganda economy.

Legal - Existing policy on waste collection

There is a lot of legislation by local authorities that govern who collects waste, where's it taken and others. Garbage collection companies are licensed to collect wastes from homes and dump it to a registered landfill in Uganda.

But luckily enough we figured out ways to solve this, though the challenge differs with different markets. Currently, we working with registered service providers(garbage collection companies) in Kampala.

Financial - lack of enough financial support

Financially, our project is supported by Makerere University, however, we're looking for more funds to scale the project across Uganda and perhaps East Africa in the near future.

We are advocating for the change in system of waste collection which is linear to those in authorities and are raising grants to support our mission.

Makerere University. Our team is part of Makerere university incubation center.

We are a total of 7 staff, 4 work full time while other 3 part timers.

The project has got a multidisciplinary team with backgrounds in computer science, waste management and business.

One member on the team has 4 years experience as an operations manager for a local garbage collection company and now serves as our operations manager. Other members have 10 years combined in software development and one other member has expertise in communication and PR for 2 years.

Currently we are partnering with Makerere university for research and local garbage collection service providers in Kampala.

Our key customers and beneficiaries are small businesses and households, we provide them with affordable waste collection services and help them divert more waste through our recycling program. This cuts their costs on waste collections and helps them grow an environmentally sustainable friendly businesses.

Yo-waste is sustainable in a number of ways, the project has got a proven source of revenue which includes the following;

Commissions between haulers and businesses/households - we charge a commission between 15-25% for every business we create between the garbage haulers & our customers.

Contracts - The other source of revenue for our business contracts with smart city projects, municipals, governments, businesses and others that use our software to improve their waste management services.

Recycling - We partner with recycling companies to increase supply for recyclable materials from our partner hauler companies, in turn, we receive a commission on incentives for every recyclable material sold to these firms.

Hauler software - We also charge subscription fees within the software for additional functionalities such as data importing, route optimization among others.

Smart City Projects - We partner with smart city projects to avail them some of our tech in implementing their garbage collection pilots the smart way.

Maintenance - Lastly, we charge a small fee for software maintenance and setup for our hauler partner businesses.

Business support and financial support are among the top things we think MIT Solve challenge can help us with. 

We are a team of young entrepreneurs with background in computer science and domain expertise of the problem but less access to business coaching and financial support.

Waste management and collection companies

Smart city pilot companies

We plan to use the prize to scale to other communities and replicate our business model of waste diversion using mobile application.