Maputo has a population of over 1. During the rainy season, streets flood and gutters quickly fill with debris and garbage, blocking the drainage of rainwater. Solid waste management is one of the most important services that the Maputo Municipal Council must provide. However the lack of funding, capacity, and transparency within the municipality has resulted in substandard waste removal.
The municipality has contracted private companies to collect the waste from the urban communities. Micro-entrepreneurs are hired to travel by foot through high-density, low-income areas using trolleys to pick up trash from households and communal bins in the peri-urban neighborhoods. Both the waste removal companies and individual waste collectors have difficulties locating waste for removal, coordinating their routes and organising collection points.
MOPA is a communications platform that allows participatory monitoring of waste collection in Maputo. Once a waste management problem is reported, one of two large waste collection companies and 56 micro-enterprises act to resolve it. With funding from Making All Voices Count, the platform expanded to 42 neighbourhoods from the four pilot areas and managed to include a free-to-user mobile application that can be used on any cellphone device with USSD and SMS alternatives.
This change enabled residents to directly notify the municipality of problems, track their resolution, and get updates on when and how their issue has been addressed. MOPA improved the response time of the Municipality by structuring the process of identifying the problem citizen input through USSD , notifying the people responsible for the solution multiple SMS sent by the platform to their phones , solving the problem and reporting phone call and providing feedback to the citizen SMS sent by the platform to their phone.
A total of reports were made by an average of citizens, with the majority of citizens making a report on average twice. Furthermore, the project improved waste removal response time from 5 days to 14 hours with a 64 per cent response rate.
