Mr. Neto has seen his life and his family’s life change in a positive way thanks to the MOPA system.
The VIP-MOZ project is implemented in Mozambique, in the city of Beira, the second largest city in Mozambique, after the country's capital Maputo, and capital of the province of Sofala. Beira has a population of approximately 450,000 inhabitants. It is located on the coast of the Indian Ocean, and has a morphological profile with a high water table, factors that determine a high vulnerability of the city to extreme events caused by climate change, such as the cyclone IDAI occurred in 2019. The city has 25 neighborhoods and, due to the rapid urban growth, the Beira City Council is faced daily with the challenge of managing urban solid waste.
In this city, Mr. Neto, 47 years old, living in the semi-urban Esturro neighborhood, married and father of 2 children aged 3 and 6 years old, residence guard and farmer, lives next to a dumpster, and presented the suffering of having to live with the waste and the foul smell that the container gives off throughout the day. The waste has caused various health problems, from malaria to cholera, because the waste container is always full and there is a lot of garbage around. With this situation, his family did not have a safe and healthy life: the children could not play outside, could not sit in the yard and could not even cook a fish because of the flies attracted by the smell of the waste. Mr. Neto, with a sad look and visible suffering, to face and manage this precarious situation on a daily basis, kept thinking of a solution to bring this problem to the Municipality, without ever knowing how to solve it.
With the presentation of the participatory monitoring platform MOPA, which offers a simple digital solution to improve in a sustainable and participatory way the management and organization of solid waste collection, Mr. Neto can now report such a situation to the municipality by a simple free SMS, describing the type of problem verified and its location. With the support of the NGO CAM, in partnership with the City Council of Beira, thanks to the financing of the program Wehubit financed by ENABEL, the platform MOPA in fact allows the participatory monitoring of citizens in the reporting of waste problems found in their neighborhoods, also in the most disadvantaged and underserved, in order to make the collection of urban solid waste more effective and efficient.
Mr. Neto expressed his great satisfaction with the MOPA system. Through participatory monitoring, all citizens, including those living in vulnerable and inaccessible neighborhoods, can actively participate in improving solid waste management in their city and neighborhoods, and on the other hand, the City Council can quickly identify reported problems and plan the means and human resources to resolve the situation. Mr. Neto was very happy when he received the message from the municipality that the problem had been registered. The next day, the container was removed and the outbreak of waste was resolved. The municipality, analyzing the problem with MOPA, has now realized that in this Esturro neighborhood there is a great production of waste and has modified the collection plan, going from once to twice a week currently, which has solved the problem of Mr. Neto, his family and his neighbors.
©ACRA