This is Africa’s playbook for municipal solid waste system reform

From the newsletter

A new World Bank assessment of waste management across the Middle East and North Africa points to Morocco as a model of how municipal solid waste reform can be structured, financed and governed at system level. Its experience offers relevant lessons for African countries working to stabilise services and modernise delivery.

• Municipal solid waste management remains weak across many African cities, with average collection rates far below the volume of waste generated, and most uncollected waste ending up in uncontrolled dumpsites rather than managed disposal facilities.

• Though Morocco’s transition is still evolving, the assessment suggests it illustrates how system reform can begin to address these structural weaknesses and build the institutional foundations needed for consistent service delivery rather than short-term operational fixes.

More details

• The World Bank assessment has framed Morocco as a reform leader because its waste transition has been designed as system reform rather than a sequence of projects. The report presents the North African country as proof that solid waste management can be modernised through coordinated legal, financial and institutional restructuring, supported by sustained engagement rather than the short-term infrastructure investments common across much of Africa. Morocco’s reforms have directly targeted this structural bottleneck. The reform process unfolded over more than a decade, signalling continuity of policy direction and allowing institutions, financing mechanisms and municipal practices to mature rather than change in cycles.

• This system approach was anchored first in the policy framework. The adoption of Solid Waste Management Law 28-00 in 2006 established a clear national legal framework, defined responsibilities and created the regulatory certainty needed to move beyond fragmented municipal practices. This has given the sector structure, anchoring early reform phases and enabling subsequent financial and municipal changes. The report indicates that sequencing reform from legal clarity to financial structuring and then to municipal implementation reduced fragmentation and improved coordination across levels of government.

• Once the legal framework established the rules of the system, the question shifted to how reform would be driven and sustained financially. Morocco’s solid waste management reform programme was supported by a Development Policy Loan totalling $535 million between 2009 and 2015. The report highlights this as the first policy loan globally dedicated to SWM, with funding tied to governance and financial reforms rather than infrastructure alone. It identifies policy-based lending as a catalyst that helped initiate sector-wide reform and sustain momentum over time. This has positioned Morocco’s approach as a precedent for applying policy-based financing to the waste sector. It also reflects a shift in the role of the state from asset provider, as is common across Africa, to system steward, focusing on regulation, oversight and financial architecture rather than direct project delivery.

• The World Bank has also highlighted Morocco’s effort to build municipal capacity within a national framework. A national solid waste management support programme and dedicated financial mechanisms have helped local governments meet new standards, with support tied to municipal performance. This has embedded incentives linking funding to service quality, governance and compliance, strengthening accountability and financial sustainability. Strengthening municipal systems also improves service reliability, contract management and cost control, areas where many African cities continue to face operational gaps.

• Reform has extended beyond institutions and finance into the social and behavioural dimensions of service delivery, mainstreaming safeguards, promoting source separation and encouraging behaviour change alongside policy and infrastructure measures. Environmental and social considerations were mainstreamed into municipal solid waste management rather than treated as separate compliance requirements. These shifts have supported waste minimisation and recovery, advancing the Three Rs, reduce, reuse and recycle, and laying groundwork for circular economy activity.  The assessment also notes the role of technology in advancing the Three Rs and supporting the shift towards material recovery alongside institutional reform.

Our take

• Across Africa, waste reform often begins with projects, yet Morocco’s trajectory shows lasting change depends on anchoring reform in institutions, financing structures and municipal capacity so systems function beyond project cycles.

• This suggests the continent’s waste challenge is less about technology gaps and more about governance depth, financial design and the ability to turn short term interventions into enduring public service systems.