Donkey carts used to collect household garbage in Bamako

In Mali’s capital, Bamako, donkeys are being put to work picking up garbage. Yacouba Diallo uses two donkeys, Keita and Kanté, to pull his cart around the city.

It is drowning in waste, and he is one of many people paid by directly by households to collect their trash, earning up to $165 a month.

And donkey carts are a more affordable transport method than motorised vehicles.

"I want to do this work with a truck, but I don’t have the means to buy one, so I use the donkeys and the cart,” he says.

Like other garbage collectors, he takes his haul to dumps sites like the one at Badalabougou with its mountains of waste.

Managers record the names of drivers and the carts arriving on the site in a notebook and manage the money at the end of the month.

“The advantage of using donkeys for this can’t be overestimated. We work with the donkey carts, a car can’t even access this place,” says manager Mamadou Sidibé.

The donkey cart network runs entirely outside of the state’s control.

Bamako has more than doubled its population in recent years and struggles to manage its garbage. State waste management services are completely absent.

Experts say it needs better infrastructure to cope with the city’s mounting piles of refuse.

“The institutions that must intervene and deal with the issue of waste management are not fully playing their role. For example, the state,” says waste management specialist and former city employee, Bamadou Sidibé.

“The state must build the infrastructure, and among this infrastructure, there is the construction of landfills that must receive all the waste from the city of Bamako,” he says.

Sidibé adds that Bamako does not have operational landfills that meet the accepted standards.

Local authorities acknowledge there is a  waste problem in the city, but blame residents saying they don’t care about their environment or health.

And with no solution in sight, the giant mountain of trash keeps growing.