Traceable waste data for African cities

Inspire others to support you.**

Africa cites are growing faster than their infrastructure. Waste management systems are overwhelmed, underfunded, and largely invisible — no one knows what is collected, where, or how much. Decisions are made blind.

Himpact Intelligence is building the data layer that African cities are missing.

Our vision is a network of smart collection points across urban Africa — connected bins equipped with QR codes that make every waste deposit traceable, measurable, and rewarding. Citizens scan to report. Collectors scan to confirm. City managers see a live environmental health dashboard. Everyone in the chain has information they never had before.

**Our pilot is Grand-Bassam.** A UNESCO World Heritage coastal city facing severe plastic pollution pressure, and the perfect proving ground for our model. We are installing QR-coded bins across the city's most impacted zones — beaches, market areas, high-traffic streets. Each bin becomes a data point. Each scan becomes a signal. Over time, the network produces something no municipality in the region currently has: reliable, granular, real-time waste data.

**Our goal** at this stage is simple — prove the loop works. Bins get installed. Citizens engage. Data flows. Recyclable materials get recovered and generate real economic value. A share of that value flows back to the community as points and rewards. The city gets a dashboard it can actually use.

**Use of funds** goes directly into this pilot: procurement and installation of the first QR-coded bin infrastructure, development of the citizen-facing WhatsApp reporting interface, and the data pipeline powering the environmental health dashboard.

**Our challenge** is the classic infrastructure gap — the technology exists, the communities are ready, but getting the first physical infrastructure in the ground requires capital and institutional trust that early-stage African startups rarely receive. This is exactly the kind of moment where support from the Ma Earth community changes the trajectory.

Grand-Bassam is the start. The model is designed to scale to every African city that deserves better than invisible waste.