Two trucks, making two to three rounds a week: that’s essentially what Kribi has to collect the roughly 12,000 tonnes of household waste it produces each year, according to a 2021 university study — a volume that has almost certainly grown since, with no newer official estimate.
Yet Kribi is a fast-growing tourist and economic hub on Cameroon’s southern coast. In accessible neighbourhoods, residents leave their trash along the roadside to wait for the trucks; public bins are scarce, and the wait keeps growing.
Collected waste ends up at the Mpangou dump, in the southeastern outskirts: a cleared plot with no infrastructure, turned by rain into a pool of fouled water — an identified breeding ground for tropical disease vectors and soil pollution.
Two systems coexist in practice. Alongside municipal collection, informal handling has taken hold in some gated neighbourhoods, where trash is dumped behind houses and sometimes used as fertiliser for banana trees.
The urban authority has announced a plan to strengthen collection, but the resources committed aren’t keeping pace with urbanisation. Informal settlements like Kribi 2nd remain the most exposed.
With two trucks serving a growing tourist city, the gap between available collection and the waste actually produced can only widen — and an already saturated Mpangou will absorb the difference.
