The town of Koudougou is the site of the present research. The colonial era (1910-1960) was the main source of development for the town ( MHU, 2012 ), which very quickly became a regional capital. Koudougou is both an urban commune and the capital of the central west administrative region, Boulkiemde Province and Koudougou Department. Located between 2˚21'51" West Longitude and 12˚15'3" North Latitude, the urban agglomeration stretches over 15 km. Before the country was fully communalized, the city covered an area of around 272 km². Today, this area has grown to 720 Km², with the addition of 22 administrative villages “ Map 1 ”. Koudougou is about one hundred kilometers west central of the capital of Burkina Faso, Ouagadougou.

The main actors in charge of sanitation in the town of Koudougou can be summed up as public agents (State and local authorities), private agents (associations, NGOs, MSEs and partners) and informal players. The central state, or the designer of policies and strategies, plays a facilitating role in coordinating the sector’s activities, even though waste management in particular and sanitation in general are services transferred to local authorities ( GRAAD, 2017 ). In fact, the central government is the interface between local authorities and decentralized cooperation agencies working in the sanitation sector. As such, it is the project owner and ensures compliance with environmental protection legislation. At local level, the roles and responsibilities of waste management stakeholders are defined by the municipal decree no. 2009/019/SG of August 6, 2009. These actors include the municipality, the local population, associations and development partners.

The Koudougou local authority is in charge of setting up and maintaining the waste collection infrastructure. Its technical departments (roads and sanitation) ensure compliance with the terms of reference signed between the waste pre-collection associations and the municipality. They also issue approvals and ensure that pre-collection associations are integrated into the city’s six (06) collection zones. Ten (10) autonomous associations are mobilized to evacuate solid waste from households to transit centers. They play a key role in the pre-collection of household waste, public and private administration waste, and infrastructure waste merchants. Some are members of the Green Brigade, which sweeps the city’s main thoroughfares. Households, which are among the biggest producers of waste in urban centers, should play a major role in the sector by applying the “polluter pays” principle. In Koudougou, the vast majority of the population has no access to the precollection service due to the insufficient number of pre-collection associations. These associations are unable to cover a large part of the town due to insufficient logistical equipment (tricycles). As a result, large quantities of household waste are disposed of anarchically by burning and dumping in the city’s public spaces. This further complicates the sector’s management.

Boosting the waste sector would not be possible without the substantial support of technical and financial partners, grouped into NGOs and international organizations. These partners, such as the Group of Recherch and Analysis Applied for Development (GRAAD), the French Development Agency (FDA), the German Technical Cooperation (GTZ) and the Swiss Cooperation, are involved in Koudougou in the framework of decentralized cooperation, supporting community sanitation initiatives. Their role is limited to advisory support, training and technical, financial and material assistance for sanitation associations and actors. In any case, solid waste management in Koudougou sometimes mobilizes a multitude of actors with conflicting interests. No framework for dialogue exists to federate the actions of the various actors. Indeed, the absence of a waste management master plan leads to confusion regarding the actors’ responsibilities in the field. This is what hampers efficient waste management in several medium-sized African towns ( Kondho et al., 2019 ). Moreover, the absence of a framework for stakeholders’ consultation exacerbates the interplay between them, who circumvent the law in order to protect their own interests. As a result, the search for sustainable solutions for rational waste management remains the least shared concern of all stakeholders. Management of the sector thus becomes competitive and disputed ( Sory, 2013 ). Moreover, the waste chain in Koudougou comprises several levels, from waste packaging to landfill, via primary and secondary collection.

Unlike the city of Lomé, where men (93%) are the main players in the waste chain ( Kondho et al., 2019 ), in the city of Koudougou women are responsible for sanitation tasks. They account for 98% of pre-collection operators. This could be explained by sociological considerations, because in Koudougou the question of the responsibility for sanitation and cleanliness falls more on women than on men. Pre-collectors therefore collect waste from households to authorized landfill sites. Pre-collection is organized door-to-door in the city’s six (06) collection zones by ten (10) community-based organizations, whose means of waste disposal are tricycles and donkey-drawn carts. In Koudougou, the pre-collection of waste only concerns the cadastral area of the town, and the choice of customers creates a certain segregation between solvent customers and those who are not. Indeed, for one waste collection per week, the customer pays 1000 FCFA per month. Paying this fee to dispose of waste is a luxury that many households, particularly low-income ones, cannot afford. Waste packaging material is a function of the socio-economic characteristics of households. While wealthy households (86% of subscribers surveyed) use conventional garbage cans, low-income households make do with makeshift equipment (buckets, cut-up cans, dishes, bags, etc.) to dispose of their waste. Waste is sometimes deposited on the ground, which complicates the work of the pre-collectors, sometimes leading to tense relations between households and pre-collectors. Figure 1 shows conventional garbage cans in households subscribing to the waste pre-collection service.

Given that good waste management begins at the source of production ( Ntain, 2010 ), it would be ideal for households to sort their waste at the source to facilitate pre-collection. However, surveys reveal that only 15.41% of households surveyed practise this eco gesture, compared with 84.59% of households who mix all kinds of waste in the garbage cans. A woman precollector state:

“Let me tell you that in the garbage cans we find everything: babies’ diapers, faeces, food scraps, and diapers with women’s menstrual periods. However, imagine if this waste were to remain in households for a long time. The nuisance would be accentuated, leading risks of disease”.

These comments reveal the pre-collectors perception of household behavior, reflecting a notorious lack of civic-mindedness that does not facilitate pre-collection work. Unlike Ouagadougou ( Sory & Tallet, 2015 ), Dakar ( Diawara, 2010 ) and Yaoundé ( Ngambi, 2015 ), where sorting centers exist to facilitate waste disposal, in Koudougou no sorting center has been built by the municipality with a view to waste recovery and recycling. Yet the absence of organized sorting and selective collection of recyclable waste at household level is a major obstacle to the emergence of a genuine waste market ( Zahrani et al., 2006 ; Diawara, 2010 ).

In the town of Koudougou, a number of actors are involved independently in waste pre-collection. These actors are neither recognized by the municipality nor attached to a pre-collection association. They therefore constitute a group of informal pre-collectors who play an active role in household waste management. There are two types of informal waste collectors: permanent and occasional. Permanent informal collectors are well equipped with vehicles and operate clandestinely in the sector. Organized into a network, they have contacts and customers. Garbage collection is carried out for a derisory sum. They evade the municipal police and care little for the destination of waste pre-collected from households and commercial facilities. They impose a kind of unfair competition on formal pre-collectors and also contribute to the formation of illegal dumps. As for occasional informal collectors, waste pre-collection is just an alternative way of generating financial resources. Vacationing students usually set out with carts in search of salvaged materials. They generally collect used batteries, plastic waste and scrap metal. In search of these types of waste, some households offer to empty their garbage cans for a derisory sum (100 FCFA or 200 FCFA) or even payment in kind (food). Not all the waste collected reaches the sites authorized by the municipality. This result is in line with those of ( Ngambi, 2015 ; Yao et al., 2021 ), who noted the presence of informals in waste pre-collection in Yaoundé, Cameroon, and Divo, Côte d’Ivoire, respectively. These authors maintain that informal workers, known as “AGALO poubelle” in Divo and “vider-poubelle” in Yaoundé, have received no training whatsoever. They collect household waste for a fee of 100 FCFA to 300 FCFA, depending on the quantity of garbage and the distance to be covered. ( Sory, 2013 ) has also demonstrated this situation in Ouagadougou, where the implementation of the 2007 waste management master plan has led to the marginalization of informal waste collectors, who are disrupting the operation of the sector. The waste collected by informals ends up in unauthorized dumps, increasing the burden on the municipality, which has to dispose of it through secondary collection.

Pre-collection and secondary collection of solid waste show mixed results in most sub-Saharan cities ( Tabet, 2001 ; Meunier-Nikiema, 2012 ). In Koudougou, in addition to the lack of land for landfill sites, secondary collection, estimated at 15% ( GRAAD, 2017 ) is virtually absent from the system. As a result, the low coverage rate of the collection service results in an unhealthy and degraded urban environment, characterized by the pollution of environmental components ( Nyassogbo, 2005 ; Gbinlo, 2010 ). In Koudougou, the public waste collection circuit, which constitutes the secondary waste collection service provided by the municipality, is not systematic. Occasionally, young people are recruited to clean up transit sites, garbage bins, rainwater drainage channels, and illegal dumps. The breakdown of the secondary collection link can be explained by defective logistical equipment for transporting waste (one functional dump truck and two underdecks) and the non-existence of a budget dedicated to the solid waste sector. In fact, the municipality hardly allocates any substantial financial resources to the department in charge of secondary collection.

According to data collected from the mayor’s finance department, the annual amount allocated to the city’s hygiene-sanitation department is constant at just sixteen million (16,000,000 FCFA), including fifteen million (15,000,000 FCFA) for the annual salaries of the women of the green brigade and one million (1,000,000 FCFA) for vehicle fuel. Sanitation is therefore the poor relation of urban policies in Africa, and this is reflected above all in the low level of funding allocated to the sector ( Matejka et al., 2005 ). Consequently, without a real will and a strong commitment from the Koudougou municipal authorities in terms of the sector’s operating budget, hopes of boosting the sector are dwindling. Another major difficulty facing the sector is the land tenure issue, which is particularly acute in the town of Koudougou. The city’s various development projects have been carried out without any provision for landfill sites. This situation further complicates the work of the pre-collectors, and their cry for help can be heard in the words of one of the association’s leaders: “Once my pre-collectors came back to park the tricycles with the garbage in front of my yard. I asked them to park in front of the town hall so that the municipal authority could take the issue of the sites seriously. The town hall has sold our sites without replacing them”. These comments reveal the difficulties encountered by the pre-collectors in the field of waste collection, given that the issue of landfill sites has become marginal in the town of Koudougou.

At municipal level, the absence of a framework for concerted action by the various actors means that each one develops strategies for circumventing legislation in order to make the most of the sector, which explains the malfunctioning of primary and secondary collection. In fact, field surveys reveal a political agenda in the management of the city’s waste. Sanitation has become an instrument of political clientelism, given the behavior of the commune’s top officials. Political rewards have led to the downgrading and sale of certain authorized landfill sites “ Map 2 ”, and even to the sale of certain equipment acquired through decentralized cooperation. All the indications are that the waste issue is not yet a priority in Koudougou. Some of the former sites planned for waste disposal since 1995 by the town council have been decommissioned and allocated to NGOs and private individuals today. Other decommissioned sites, such as the “village laafi” (health village) in district 8 and the youth listening center in district 9, are used for public utility infrastructures.

However, this research has not shed any light on the power struggles and conflicts of interest of the stakeholders in the waste sector. This is justified by the fact that in the town of Koudougou, the issue of waste is still marginal for local authorities, which explains the low level of funding for activities in the sector. Future research could focus on the political issues surrounding waste management, as well as the environmental and ecological inequalities caused by waste. In addition, waste recovery through recycling and composting represents an opportunity to reduce piles of rubbish and the rate of urban unemployment, in order to move towards an ecological and sustainable city.