Bujumbura buries 40,000 tonnes a year. Almost all of it is still worth something.
A public–private programme to rehabilitate the Buterere landfill and build Burundi's first municipal circular waste system. Keep scrolling: you'll travel the whole programme.
Forty-three years of waste, in the open
Buterere and Mubone have taken Bujumbura's waste since 1983 and 2009. Nothing is sorted, nothing is capped, and leachate drains toward the Lake Tanganyika basin.
Roughly 730,000 tonnes in place across both sites, with 35,000 to 40,000 more arriving every year. Leachate drains toward the lake basin untreated.
It starts at the kerb
Separate collection across one defined quartier: households and markets, on a route that actually runs. Without this step, everything downstream gets mixed again.
4 tper day in the pilot phaseOne stream becomes four
Every line has an identified destination before it is separated. Select a fraction to see what the programme does with it.
The organic fraction returns to the soil
Composting windrows, then anaerobic digestion from phase 4. The compost goes to peri-urban farms around Bujumbura, where soil depletion is a working constraint.
~87%diverted from burial at full capacityOnly the residual is buried
Lined, with leachate capture and a cap. It is the only fraction left, and the end of untreated runoff toward the Lake Tanganyika basin.
~13%of the stream, against all of it todayFrom 4 to 630 tonnes a day, in five phases
Each phase is separately fundable and proves the next. Pick a phase and the coverage spreads across the model.
USD 95.6M in total. 37.5M to raise.
The balance is covered by operating revenues, partner contribution and in-kind support.
Total programme investment across five years.
Net financing need: the share for grant and blended finance.
Pilot-phase funding request.
The pilot request is under 0.5% of total programme investment. It is what unlocks everything else, because it produces the operating data on which every later financing decision depends.
Who applies decides what can be funded
The main barrier is not the project. It is applicant type. Switch applicants on to see the windows open.
windows accessible with the company alone.
African Development Bank
Infrastructure finance and blended instruments for phases 3 to 5.
European Union Delegation
Demonstration grant for the pilot phase.
ENABEL / TAKIWAMA
Technical assistance on waste in Burundi.
UN Environment Programme
Circular economy, plastics, the Lake Tanganyika basin.
Africa Circular
Dedicated African circular-economy funding.
African Water Facility, GEF, EEP Africa
Windows with a mandated applicant status.
Let's talk about the pilot
The full pack (five-phase plan, cost structure, financial model and investment note) is available in French and English.
- Programme lead
- PrimeCleanSolutions (PCS)
in partnership with Nivion - Location
- Bujumbura, Burundi
- contact@bzwtp.org
- Working languages
- FrançaisEnglishKirundiKiswahili