Clean Up Day at SOMAGEP!

On Wednesday 18th of July, SOMAGEP-SA participated in Africa’s largest cleanup by organizing an ActForChange.Africa event in the Djicoroni Para with support of the WaterWorX programme. The aim was to clean the neighborhood and create awareness that whatever waste they throw in the surrounding eventually arrives in the Niger from which SOMAGEP is extracting the water that arrives in their taps.

Due to heavy rain in the night from Tuesday to Wednesday and continuous rain on Wednesday morning, we had to change our meet up location last minute to the parking area of SOMAGEP-S.A. instead of the football field that was flooded by then. But despite the rain and some problems with the party tent installation, all was ready at exactly 9 am and people started coming in. We provided them with gloves, a bio-degradable garbage bag, a mouth cap and a SOMAGEP t-shirt and cap. At 9.30 am the Deputy Director gave a short word of welcome and then everyone ran off, ready to clean! That was exactly the minute the sun broke through again and we kept it dry till 11.30 am.

They brought different tools to pick plastic from the water and remove tramped waste from the soil. Eventually, over 150 people from SOMAGEP, SOMAPEP, EDM, local youth and women associations and several NGOs participated in the great event and over 400 bags of waste were removed from the area. We even had several newspapers and radio stations covering the event and taking several interviews. At 11.30 it started dripping again so we got together under the tent, drank some water and made a group picture of everyone that was still left after 2 hours of hard work. The head of the HR department thanked everyone and expressed the drive to do this more often and in surroundings of all the different stations, because it is normal to keep your neighborhood clean, so let’s keep in touch!

Unfortunately, because of the change of meeting point in a less visible location and the amount of waste already in the direct surrounding of SOMAGEP, the spontaneous participation of locals was low and the awareness created in the surrounding stayed therefore limited. But the head of the youth association has promised to serve as a relay to other young people to get the message across. So lessons learned, next cleanup will be outside of the raining season!