We have been appointed by WWF Mozambique on behalf of the Regional Office for Africa to research the issue of plastic pollution from coastal nations in Africa and develop a Strategic Plan for addressing this.

This will support the organisation’s goal of minimising plastic pollution across the continent by creating enabling conditions for sharing of lessons and best practices, and policy push through the Nairobi Convention and Abidjan Convention.

Initially, our team will assess the extent to which policies in the coastal countries that are party to the Abidjan and Nairobi Conventions currently address plastic pollution, before going on to identify a range of key measures that could be implemented to reduce the flow of plastic into the environment.

We will work with WWF South Africa to establish a baseline of plastic flows in eight representative countries to base our research on. These countries will cover the broadest range possible in terms of geography; scale of plastic pollution; nature of waste infrastructure; and the scale of policies in place to tackle plastics. This research, together with our review of existing policy, legal and institutional frameworks in place to tackle the problem will then be used to inform our suggested range of policy gaps and solutions to reduce plastic pollution across the continent.

These recommended measures will form the basis for WWF Africa’s Strategic Plan to address plastic pollution. The program will also aim to help WWF Africa to influence the global push for an international agreement to eliminate plastic leakage into the environment.

Alongside producing this document, our consultants will also participate in a training and dissemination session with key representatives from the Abidjan and Nairobi Conventions, working closely throughout the process with WWF’s teams in South Africa and Mozambique, in partnership with the WWF Regional Office for Africa and WWF Norway.

This project is our latest on the African continent, following on from our work with the Danish EPA on packaging waste flows in Kenya, which found that an estimated 174,000 tonnes of plastic packaging were left in the natural environment annually.

Picture courtesy of Frédéric Ducarme, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.