Electronic waste (e-waste) is an ever-growing problem in Africa. The hardware Viafrica supplies to schools and other clients, will finally break down there. Because Viafrica does not want to increase the e-waste problem, we already started negotiations with possible partners a while ago to come to a solution for this. That is not simple, because local processing is still in its infancy in Africa. Some parts cannot be processed locally and therefore have to be shipped to Europe to be processed here.
To ensure that there are enough possibilities to establish a sustainable collection system locally, three students from the International Entrepreneurship & Development Minor of Delft University of Technology are researching this. They examine whether there is e-waste and if so, where this can be found and how this is handled at the moment. They also verify if people are prepared to hand over waste to us so that we can collect it. The waste that cannot be processed well in Tanzania, will be brought back to the Netherlands for further processing.
If the results from this research are positive, we can start a pilot for collecting e-waste in Moshi. If this is successful, we might be able to expand this collection in the future to the locations we are starting together with NICE.