In recent years, Ethiopia has become a regional leader in solid waste management. Last year, the country transformed the Koshe dump site, the only landfill in Addis Ababa, into a new waste-to-energy plant, the first such project on the continent. The plant incinerates up to 1,400 tonnes of waste every day—roughly 80 per cent of the city’s rubbish—supplying the capital with 25 per cent of its household electricity needs.
However, despite these important strides, challenges remain in Ethiopia. Although the country has ratified the Basel, Stockholm and Rotterdam conventions, legislation and policies for environmentally sound management of hazardous chemicals and wastes are still at a very early stage and not effective in preventing illegal dumping of waste as well as contamination of water, soil and air resources.
To help Ethiopia meet these challenges, the Chemicals and Waste Management Programme is supporting the country with a three-year project to enhance institutional capacity for sound management of hazardous wastes and persistent organic pollutants.
In the initial stages, a project management unit will be formed, made up of multiple stakeholders and representatives from key participating ministries and public and private organizations. This unit will be responsible for reviewing and assessing Ethiopia’s current legislative framework, which, despite numerous advances in recent years, does not specifically target the importation, production, transport, use and disposal of hazardous waste.
Once legal gaps are identified, the project will seek to update existing policies, strategies and regulatory frameworks as well as enforcement mechanisms. Ethiopia will also work towards creating a more synergies between government institutions, as well as engaging in dialogue on mainstreaming chemical management into national plans and institutions.
Many people in Ethiopia are not aware of the criminal implications of environmental violations and the need to report such crimes to the police, while few environmental cases have gone through the full length of the criminal justice system. To resolve this pressing issue, Ethiopia will be conducting a series of capacity-building activities, including developing training modules, creating awareness-raising programmes, training trainers and providing equipment.
Ethiopia will also work to establish a national coordination mechanism for chemicals and waste management by engaging government ministries, the private sector, civil society groups and other relevant stakeholders in the implementation of sound management policies, including the establishment of a national steering committee. Authorities will also make budgetary provisions in national, regional and institutional planning to ensure funding for these activities is sustainable even after the project’s completion.
These combined actions will also help Ethiopia improve and update its reporting system under the Basel and Stockholm conventions. This will include improvements in data generation and management, as well as the development of a sustainable hazardous waste inventory as the basis for further action plans to mitigate their impact.
Given the particular vulnerability of women and children to chemical exposure, this project will work to promote the participation of women in policy development and decision-making processes. This will help ensure that existing policies and programmes, as well as future institutional changes, are assessed with particular attention to gender.
The depth and breadth of these transformative actions, from updating legislation to improving data collection, will ensure that this project has a lasting impact. In so doing, the recent leaps Ethiopia has made in chemicals and waste management will be not only maintained, but ultimately become the basis for a sustainable environmental policy for years to come.
For further information please contact the Special Programme Secretariat at unepchemicalsspecialprogramme@un.org
