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DOI: 10.4324/9781003452423-8
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5 Self‑organized waste pickers
Marginalized yet vital to the
African city of Bamako
Sidy Lamine Bagayoko
Introduction
According to the World Bank, “[t]he quantity of waste produced in the world
is exploding: it is expected to increase up to 69 per cent between 2012 and
2025” (Kasa etal., World Bank Group2018). The increase is driven in part
by the population and urban growth in sub‑Saharan African countries. City
councils in developing countries commonly lack the means to adequately man‑
age this rapid increase in waste. Mali, the capital of Bamako, has 93 neigh‑
bourhoods with more than 2.1million people (Mesplé etal.2014, 581). The
quantity of waste produced is enormous. According to data published in 2018,
the city of Bamako produces approximately 1470 tons of waste per day, and
the majority of that is plastic (Média terre 2018). Yet, as there is no formal sys‑
tem of waste management, this waste creates a continuous threat to everyday
living in the city. At the same time, in Bamako as in other cities in the global
South, this garbage contains items that can be quite lucrative if collected and
recycled. Most of the waste dumps in the city of Bamako are known to the city
council authorities. Even if they are not ocial, people have no other place to
throw away their garbage. These dumps are considered to be “transit depos‑
its” (dépôts de transit). Waste pickers are not authorized to work in them, but
both authorities and the surrounding population know that waste pickers are
useful for the community and the chain of waste management.
This chapter studies people who work and live in literal “dumps”, picking
through garbage as a way to survive financially. The overwhelming majority
of the people living in these garbage dumps are women. In Mali culturally,
cleaning is seen as a woman’s job although it is physically demanding. The
fact that those working in the dumps are mostly women can also be explained
by the fact that the majority of women interviewed did not receive a formal
education and were therefore unemployed. Waste picking was therefore their
only means of earning money. Female waste pickers have often also ended up
in this occupation by following in the footsteps of their elders. Waste pickers
earn just enough for survival, enabling the obtainment of food, water, clothes,
and possibly even a place to sleep in the garbage dump. Women of all ages who
work in these dumps explained how they ended up working in this particular
Self‑organized waste pickers 81
occupation, what kind of materials they look to resell, where they live, and
who their potential clients are.
From Monday to Sunday, and from early morning to dusk, waste pick‑
ers are busy collecting materials they estimate can be sold to buyers. Being a
waste picker means searching through food residues, plastic bags, rusty met‑
als, and empty cans in dangerous conditions for uncertain pay. They do not
need any particular skills or competence to do this job. In fact, however, they
have gained competence to perform it as they have needed to learn how to
use dierent tools such as pickaxes, gloves, boots, and masks and how to deal
with the waste in order to avoid sickness and injury. Individually, they rush
after the donkey cart that comes to dump its load of new trash starting around
6:00AM, and they can continue until 11:00 AM: “It is possible to find all
kind of items in the waste discharged here, if you are lucky, you can find gold
here” (F.D. waste picker 2021). Waste pickers mostly use their hands without
gloves to sort out the rubbish. Seventy‑five‑year‑old T.D. told me that waste
picking is full of hazards such as becoming ill from breathing toxic dust, get‑
ting tuberculosis, or being infected with tetanus from sharp rusted metal. She
told of one time she was critically injured by a huge stone of concrete and
managed, with the support of her workers’ association, to recover. However,
she said that she had sometimes found money and valuable objects such as
small gold jewellery, which was her explanation for why she was addicted to
waste picking.
The work of waste pickers is societally important in that it helps manage
the overflow of waste at a given site. Through middlemen, waste pickers pro‑
vide used materials to factories. In Bamako, more than half of recycled waste
is recovered informally, which also allows the city to reduce its expenses. The
most important item collected by waste pickers is plastic, in the form of used
plastic bags and plastic cans. Plastic is sold easily because factories need it to
produce shoes, cups, and buckets. The plastic items collected by waste pick‑
ers are sold by the kilo. The kilo price depends on the fluctuation of the
market and the need of the factories for plastic. Waste pickers sort the trash
and once a week meet with buyers who take the waste to sell to factories: “We
collect a bunch of waste when we separate dierent kinds of waste. We take
plastic apart, aluminium apart, iron apart, zinc apart and old shoes apart”
(C.C., waste picker 2021). After the process of waste sorting, trucks come to
transport waste directly to factories in order to be recycled.
Waste picking exists because of extreme poverty. Waste picking is therefore
also an expression of marginalization. Bénédicte Florin (2015) has studied
waste pickers in Cairo and presents them as people on the margins of the mar‑
gins. Whereas the waste pickers in Cairo sought to recycle some of the waste
they picked to use as food for their pigs, in Mali, waste pickers wait for the
trash to arrive at the transit deposit where they collect waste that still has some
resale value in order to sell it. They do this with both organic and non‑organic
(plastic and metal) wastes. Non‑organic waste is recycled by selling it directly
to shoe factories and other kinds of factories or to middlemen reselling it to
82 Sidy Lamine Bagayoko
those factories. Organic waste is sold to people caring for sheep and goats at
home.
Because of the failure of public authorities to organize waste manage‑
ment, waste pickers have created an alternative institutional arrangement by
self‑organizing themselves into informal unions that can be seen as a form of
social entrepreneurship. These associations help consolidate their market posi‑
tions, share innovations that increase productivity, and protect their rights as
workers in the informal sector of the economy. They appoint a representative
who speaks on their behalf to the city council and other formal institutions
in charge of bringing garbage to the transit deposit. The more senior waste
pickers who have been involved in waste picking for a longer time teach their
juniors or the most recently arrived about their union and about how they
can work together in harmony to protect their rights and interests. As another
round of new people converge on the transit deposits, the cycle continues.
The younger waste pickers sometimes also organize themselves into separate
youth associations.
Addressing the current self‑organization of waste pickers, this article asks
the following: How do waste pickers and self‑organized youth groups impact
the city, its environment, and industry? How do waste pickers self‑organize
and how does this self‑organization aect them? How could the status of waste
pickers be improved and what would be the impact of their improved status?
Data and methods
In this research, I was simultaneously a cultural insider (Malian) and a cultural
outsider (male, educated, and non‑waste picker). I used qualitative methods
employed in social anthropology including interviews and observation in the
places occupied by the people I studied. Among the total of 47 people whom
I interviewed, the youngest was 13 years old and four persons were between
65 and 75 years of age. The oldest waste pickers claimed to have been involved
in this income‑generating activity for more than 30 years. Twenty‑seven waste
pickers were between the ages of 35 years and 58 years and the average num‑
ber of years in this activity was 12 years, with two or three having more than
20 years of experience. Fifteen participants were aged between 13 and 35 years.
The majority of waste pickers were women, because they are the ones most
likely to find themselves in the situation of poverty.
The research took place in Bamako, the capital city of Mali. According to
the Institute of Statistics (INSTAT)1 (2021), at the moment of my research
from 2020 to 2021, there were 36 transit deposits in Bamako. I focused my
research on two large transit deposits, Lafiabougou Cimetière and Badalabou‑
gou Colline. Most of my time during the field research was spent in Badalabou‑
gou Colline, and the majority of the interviews were carried out in that place.
The transit deposit Badalabougou Colline takes its name from the neighbour‑
hood of Badalabougou where it is located. Badalabougou is a neighbourhood
Self‑organized waste pickers 83
located in Commune V of Bamako District. It is the first neighbourhood on
the right bank of the Niger River that intersects the city. Badalabougou was
created in 1951 and includes the first bridge of Bamako, called now the Bridge
of Martyrs, linking the two banks of Bamako. Between the neighbourhoods
of Badalabougou and Daoudabougou, there is a large hill called the hill of
Badalabougou (Badalabougou Colline) and the transit deposit of Badalabou‑
gou is located on that hill.
In addition to prior qualitative data collected from participant observation
in situ, I interviewed 57 persons in February and March 2021 from both
sides of the river passing through Bamako. Participants were chosen according
to their level of involvement in recovering items at the illegal landfills in the
neighbourhoods of Lafiabougou and Badalabougou. Interview participants
included, besides waste pickers, city counsellors responsible for environment
and waste management; middlemen who haul away the scavenged materials;
and recycling firms that transform waste into new products such as shoes,
buckets, and cords. At the illegal landfill sites, I mainly interviewed women
and youth. I conducted another round of data collection in May–July 2022,
spending several weeks visiting people who worked as waste pickers on dif‑
ferent sites in Bamako. To gather data, I utilized a still photo camera and a
dictaphone. The photographs that I took of the waste pickers, taken with their
full written consent,2 were used to enrich my data and for analytical purposes.
The discussions I had with interview participants were audio recorded.
Results and findings
Waste pickers with limited rights to the city
Waste pickers serve the city as cleaners and recyclers, but they are not compen‑
sated by the city. In fact, informal garbage workers are considered illegal work‑
ers because they do not have formal permission to undertake garbage picking.
While they do not directly violate any laws, they also do not have authoriza‑
tion to work or live in the waste dump. Waste pickers are thus confronted by
two kinds of discrimination. They are seen as outcasts because they work and
live in dirt and trash; their work is not ocially recognized as legal, which
means pickers can lose their source of income at any time through eviction by
authorities. The insecurity of waste pickers’ lives exacerbates their experiences
of social injustice in the urban area they depend on.
At the same time, waste picking work is valuable not only for the city but
also for individuals in the sense that it gives pickers some degree of autonomy
and self‑suciency. One of the oldest waste pickers I interviewed, T.D., was
75 years of age and from the neighbourhood of Daoudabougou. She explained
how and why she had ended up doing the job of waste picking. In 2000,
when civil war broke out in theRepublic of Côte d’Ivoire, she was forced to
come back to her home country of Mali. She did not have any job in Bamako
84 Sidy Lamine Bagayoko
because she was unqualified for any formal position and was already 52 years
old. Her husband had died long before, and her daughters were not able to
provide for her. She did not want to beg on street corners or along the road,
so she began work as a waste picker. D.S. and Y.T. told me that they are seen
in their community and families as “dirty waste pickers”. Their reply to this
accusation was as follows: ‘Who is going to take care of us?’ In other words,
people do not pick garbage by choice, but out of necessity and to avoid being
a burden on others. According to the waste pickers, they are involved in that
activity to earn a living and become respectable in their neighbourhoods (cf.
motorcycle taxi drivers studied by Wamala‑Larsson 2022; also, Agbiboa 2018;
Wamala‑Larson 2019). Through the activity of waste picking, waste pickers
strive to express their rights to the city (Lefebvre 1991; Wamala‑Larsson 2019,
2022).
Self‑organization of waste pickers
My research revealed that to counter the social injustice in their lives, women
garbage pickers have self‑organized into an informal association with a leader.
When they searched for valuable trash or usable or sellable tools, they seemed
to work alone or in small family groups. Everyone sought objects for their own
personal use or resale, but when I went deeper to interrogate them, I found
that they were, in fact, united and connected because they were organized into
an informal cooperative. They had a leader who spoke on their behalf when
the city council wished to discuss something with them related to the manage‑
ment of the transit deposit site where they worked:
My name is M.S., I have a professional card provided by the city council
which shows that I work a waste picker, I am a kind of interface between
waste pickers and the city council of our Commune. I was appointed
mainly by the group of women but also men working on this garbage
to pick wastes.
(M.S., waste picker 2021)
The people involved in the cooperative are from dierent backgrounds in
terms of sex, age, and ethnicity, but almost all of them come from rural areas
and are currently living in neighbourhoods considered inner cities such as
Daoudabougou and Sabalibougou. Waste pickers working informally in the
waste management sector are aware of their poverty and know they lack suf‑
ficient food, housing, health, and education. By collaborating and organizing
with other waste pickers, they have laid the groundwork for an entrepreneurial
activity that allows them to organize their lives and gives them hope for the
future. According to M.D.:
the fact that waste pickers are organised in association with an appointed
leader has been a factor that they are respected by the city council. Being
Self‑organized waste pickers 85
in a group made it easy to discuss and protect some basic rights like the
price of the items they collect.
(M.D., waste picker 2021)
Actually, we were considered we are still considered like dirty garbage
workers, but with our initiative to be organized in association, we have
now a kind of self‑confidence.
(M.D., waste picker 2021)
The waste pickers’ association is an informal cooperative, organized locally.
This informal cooperative constitutes a spontaneous collaboration because
waste pickers do not go through any bureaucratic membership processes
(cf., Matt etal. 2012). Their activity of waste picking includes collaboration
between them as workers on waste dumps, maintaining good relationships
with the persons bringing waste from households in the donkey carts, and,
finally, working for good business relationships with the persons coming to
buy reusable waste with them. The roles and duties of the waste pickers’ asso‑
ciation are to inform and fix the price of the products they collect in order to
protect the rights of its members. For example, in the case of announcements
coming from the city council or emergency announcements, the waste pickers’
informal association organizes a general assembly to inform its members and
to hold a discussion if needed. A committee acting on behalf of all the associa‑
tion members is also periodically informed about the price of a kilo of plastic,
aluminium, iron, zinc, etc., to be sold to resellers. For example, if resellers
decide to lower the prices of plastics or aluminium due to lower demand from
factories, they need to discuss it with the leader of the waste picker association,
who in turn should discuss it with all the waste pickers in a general assembly
or meeting (Figures 5.1–5.3).
Discussion: waste pickers are vital to the urban environment
Sonia Dias (2020) calls the phenomenon of waste dumps an unprecedented
social‑environmental crisis that, due to a lack of management, threatens cities
such as Bamako (but is scattered over many African cities). Given that the gov‑
ernment of Mali does not have a consistent plan to deal with the situation of
solid waste, waste pickers are vital to the informal system of waste management.
Although the work of waste pickers involves competition over who finds a
valuable discarded object first or who finds the best one to be sold, their activi‑
ties are characterized by a high level of connectivity and interdependence (cf.
Ruoslahti 2019), and they end up collaborating and organizing an informal
industry of recycling that keeps the city relatively clean and enables factories
to reuse plastic waste.
According to the interviews, waste pickers are conscious of the fact that
their work is beneficial to society. They are aware of the supply and refinement
chain of reusable materials onward to resellers as a whole, and they know the
86 Sidy Lamine Bagayoko
Figures5.1 A female waste picker with her grandchild under their improvised shelter
built on a waste dump (by Sidylamine Bagayoko, May 2021).
Figures5.2 A female waste picker with her grandchild under their improvised shelter
built on a waste dump (by Sidylamine Bagayoko, May 2021).
Self‑organized waste pickers 87
factories for plastic shoes, small plastic bags, cups, buckets, and organic wastes
constituted of horns and foodstus that they dry. Substances from the horns
of cows and sheep are sold to China to be made into knife handles, guitar
necks, plates, salt and pepper shakers, and other kitchen utensils.
Because of our role as waste pickers, several industries can buy
second‑hand cheap raw materials with the solid wastes like plastics,
aluminium, iron, etc., we collect.
(F. D., waste picker 2012)
Figure5.3 The shelter of a female waste picker built on the waste dump (by Sidylamine
Bagayoko, May 2021).
88 Sidy Lamine Bagayoko
The societal function performed by waste pickers also includes waste trans‑
formation in Bamako. This part of the work of waste pickers is facilitated by a
separate youth association that has organized a small company that transforms
plastic wastes into briquettes and cobblestones. This youth association com‑
prises less than ten persons, the majority of whom were previously unemployed.
Both young men and young women are involved, working together in the
association because of their commitment to a clean and healthy urban environ‑
ment. The dierence between the usual waste pickers and the youth associa‑
tion is that the latter is a self‑owned company. The youth association delivers
garbage cans and pots for plants–both recycled from plastic–directly to con‑
sumers or through a middleman. The youth association uses a barrel‑shaped
container of roughly 50litres to cook the plastic. They first put in used engine
oil, then add the plastic waste, and melt it in dierent moulds to make bri‑
quettes and cobblestones. The used engine oil aids in the process of melting
and produces a dark colour. A. S., the leader of the association, said:
We make garbage cans based on the recycled materials. The women who
collect those plastic wastes proceed to clean them. When those plastics
arrive here, we crush and squeeze them in a machine and build them
into trash cans.
Thus, from plastic wastes, tools are built for collecting other kinds of waste.
The trash cans used by families throughout Mali help reduce diculties in the
management of domestic waste. According to M.S:
If we have enough small used water cans in plastic, we can make more
than 500 trash cans per month.
In addition to the manufacturing of trash cans, they make pots for plants in
which people can grow flowers or small vegetables and easily move the plants
from one place to another. Garbage cans and mobile gardens are the youth
association’s priority for manufacturing, but the rest of the plastic waste is
also crushed and transformed into small round plastic stones used for build‑
ing roads and other surfaces such as football fields. The informal recycling
process is in itself an innovation, creating tools for waste collection and plastic
that replace aggregates, sand, gravel, and cement in construction work. These
innovations would not be possible without the self‑organization of waste pick‑
ers and the assistance of youth associations (Figures 5.4–5.8).
Conclusion
The case of Bamako waste pickers shows that innovation can come from
unlikely activities as long as there is a minimum of organization. Waste pick‑
ers and self‑organized youth associations are crucial in the management chain
of processing and recycling waste. Their work reduces the huge number of
plastics, iron, copper, zinc, etc., in the environment, and so in fact reduces
Self‑organized waste pickers 89
Figure5.4 Waste pickers in the dump struggling to find useful objects (by Sidylamine
Bagayoko, May 2021).
Figures5.5 Piles of animal horns as organic waste needed for selling to Chinese or
Malian industries that transform them into chicken food (by Sidylamine
Bagayoko, May 2021).
90 Sidy Lamine Bagayoko
environmental pollution. In the end, waste pickers also contribute to the work
of industries because they provide cheap raw materials for the manufacture
of shoes, buckets, rubbish cans, and other plastic products useful to Malian
communities.
Waste pickers have organized themselves to escape marginalization and ille‑
gality and to survive. In so doing, they both ensure the continuation of their
livelihoods and reduce the waste problem in the city. The self‑organization is
so far very limited, as the priority has been to protect waste pickers and estab‑
lish solidarity between them. Since they know now that self‑organization has
been very useful for them, they wish to continue manufacturing final products
made from waste that they collect from garbage piles. To this end, further
formalization of the status of waste pickers is needed because their current
self‑organization does not enable them, for example, to raise funding from
banks, which would be needed in order to develop their means of waste pick‑
ing and the processing of waste.
In terms of society at large, waste pickers play a crucial role in the manage‑
ment of waste in cities that lack resources to collect and manage properly all
the transit deposits of waste. Yet, governments in sub‑Saharan cities still treat
these waste pickers as informal, which means that they are not entitled to for‑
mal assistance from central or municipal authorities. The example of Bamako
illustrates that waste pickers are in need of rights to attain a minimum level of
Figures5.6 Piles of animal horns as organic waste needed for selling to Chinese or
Malian industries that transform them into chicken food (by Sidylamine
Bagayoko, May 2021).
Self‑organized waste pickers 91
Figures5.7 Bags made of old mosquito nets and other materials filled with plastics
gathered by women waste pickers, waiting for buyers. In general, the trucks
of buyers come every week or every two weeks to collect the bags gathered
by waste pickers. They always buy whole bags once they need the indicated
product in them (by Sidylamine Bagayoko, May 2021).
Figures5.8 Bags made of old mosquito nets and other materials filled with plastics
gathered by women waste pickers, waiting for buyers. In general, the trucks
of buyers come every week or every two weeks to collect the bags gathered
by waste pickers. They always buy whole bags once they need the indicated
product in them (by Sidylamine Bagayoko, May 2021).
92 Sidy Lamine Bagayoko
living conditions. With ocial status, waste pickers could directly assist city
councils, and they could pay taxes and ensure their own well‑being through
demanding a better working environment (Wamala‑Larson 2022). With fund‑
ing and training, they could also create their own companies and develop their
tools of work further, such as making their own boots from the plastics and
bags they collect and using wheelbarrows to make their work easier.
Notes
1 Institut national de la statistique (INSTAT), National Institute of Statistics of Mali,
2021.
2 A formal document of written consent was given to people interviewed in the field.
When persons were not able to read or write, I read out to them a description of my
research telling why I was doing it and what would happen to the information they
gave me. They signed with a symbol or something else. Both I as the researcher and
the person studied received a signed copy of the written consent document.
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