Lusaka produces far more rubbish than it manages to collect, and the gap between the two is where both a public-health problem and a business opportunity sit. An estimated 1.2 million kilograms of largely unsorted waste is dumped in the city each day, much of it never passing through any formal collection system at all. That failure is usually discussed as a sanitation crisis, and it is one. But every heap of uncollected refuse in a market or a compound is also a service that somebody, somewhere, is willing to pay to make disappear – and in Zambia that somebody is increasingly a small enterprise rather than the council.
Start with how the system is meant to work, because the enterprise opening only makes sense against it. Solid waste in the capital is coordinated by the Lusaka Integrated Solid Waste Management Company, a public company that outsources collection to licensed private operators working defined zones. In principle a household or business pays for collection and a registered operator carries the waste to a transfer station or the dumpsite. In practice the coverage is patchy, illegal dumping is routine, and enforcement has been weak. In August 2026 LISWMC signed a memorandum with the National Prosecution Authority precisely to change that. Its chief executive, Imuwana Mwanamwalye, said that ‘addressing these challenges requires more than operational interventions’, and that what was needed was ‘a coordinated legal and institutional response that ensures offences are appropriately prosecuted and compliance is strengthened’. The Director of Public Prosecutions, Gilbert Phiri, put the logic more bluntly: ‘Where there is an offence, there must be consequences. Where there are no consequences, we breed impunity.’
Why the gap is a market, not just a mess
The reason enforcement matters to an entrepreneur is that it turns a free-for-all into a priced service. As long as anyone can tip a load into a storm drain at no cost, a paid collector competes against zero. The moment illegal dumping carries a real risk of prosecution, the household and the shop have a reason to pay someone to do it properly – and that someone is a business. The value chain is longer than most people assume. It runs from collection at the door, to sorting, to transport, to recovery of what can be sold on – and each link is a distinct service that can be provided by a different, small operator.
This is where the work overlaps with cleaning, and where it becomes practical for the readers of this magazine. A cleaning business already goes into homes, offices and premises; the waste those places generate is a natural adjacent service. A crew that deep-cleans a block of flats between tenants is already handling the clearance of what the last tenant left. A team that services a market or a small mall is already collecting the day’s refuse. The step from cleaning a space to managing the waste it produces is short, and it is a step into a market with visible, unmet demand and, increasingly, a regulatory reason for customers to buy in.
The mechanism for taking that work is coordination, not capital. Most of these jobs are one-off or periodic clearances rather than daily rounds, which suits an operator who can assemble a crew for a defined task and stand it down afterwards. An introduction platform such as Kleana is built around exactly that pattern for cleaning: a client is introduced to a coordinated crew for a specific job, pays a single introduction fee, and the workers themselves pay nothing. A cleaning operator using that model to staff a one-off clearance – a builder’s site, a market stall row, a house being emptied – can take waste-adjacent work without carrying the payroll of a full collection company. The heavy end of the chain, the trucks and the transfer stations, belongs to the licensed zone contractors; the light end, the sorting and clearing at source, is open to anyone who can organise labour reliably.
What this changes for a small operator
For a cleaning entrepreneur, the practical consequence is a second line of revenue that uses the team and the client relationships already in place. Recovery is the part worth watching. Zambian analysts have pointed to the resource-recovery opportunity in waste that is currently landfilled unsorted – the recyclable plastics, metals and organic material mixed into that daily 1.2 million kilograms. An operator who sorts at the point of collection is not only paid to remove the waste; it can capture value from part of it. That is the difference between a cost the customer wants gone and a stream the operator can partly monetise.
None of this works without the discipline the formal system is trying to impose. An operator handling other people’s waste has to do it lawfully – carrying it to a proper transfer point, not the nearest empty plot – because the whole opening depends on the same enforcement that is now being tightened. An enterprise that undercuts the licensed system by dumping illegally is not a business; it is the problem the prosecutors are coming for, and it poisons the market it claims to serve.
The move that matters is to stop seeing uncollected waste as the council’s failure and start seeing it as an unserved market with a widening regulatory tailwind. A cleaning business does not need a fleet to enter it. It needs to add clearance and sorting to what it already offers, staff the jobs as coordinated crews rather than standing headcount, do the work strictly within the licensed system, and treat the recyclable fraction as revenue rather than rubbish. The waste is not going anywhere on its own. In a city that dumps more than a million kilograms a day, that is the whole opportunity.
Source: Kleana Africa – kleana.africa
