A program of the U.S. Agency for International Development
supports partnerships between U.S. and international cities to help improve environmental management.

Dayton, Ohio, City Manager Valerie Lemmie helped government officials in Lusaka, Zambia, improve their solid waste collection operations. "It's not just an environmental issue. It really is a community issue, it's an organizational issue, it's a capacity issue."

Lemmie worked with Lusaka officials, participating in the Resource Cities program sponsored by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and directed by the International City/County Management Association (ICMA). The program is allowing city officials from transitional nations to learn from the experience, successes, and mistakes of their counterparts in U.S. cities who have confronted many of the same problems. The city partnerships explore a wide range of urban issues: environmental protection, economic development, historic preservation, and strategic planning.

The Resource Cities program "took practitioners -- people that every single day are responsible for the delivery of public services -- it took them and used them as the technical advisors and counselors to their peers," according to Valerie Lemmie, city manager in Dayton, Ohio. Her city was paired with Lusaka, a city of almost 2 million people, in a two-year exchange program funded by a USAID grant. "The program was quite good," said Wilson Lungu, the director of solid waste collections in Lusaka.

Launched in 1997, the Resource Cities program comes at a time when decentralization of government authority is taking place worldwide. U.S. participants strive to help municipal officials build more effective and responsive governments as they weather these political changes, at the same time they struggle with the needs of rapidly expanding urban areas. Thirty-one partnerships have been established under the program worldwide, involving more than 60 U.S. and international cities and municipal associations. Twenty new partnerships are expected to be completed in the next two years, according to ICMA.

Johannesburg, South Africa, and Houston, Texas

Waste management officials in Johannesburg and Houston first teamed up in 1997 at a time of wrenching change in South Africa. For local governments, the end of apartheid created a new imperative to provide services to all citizens -- regardless of race -- and to create greater equity and opportunity among the city employees who provided the services.

Amidst this national upheaval, it doesn't seem surprising that public awareness of environmental concerns was low. "There's no awareness at all," said Christa Venter, the executive officer for waste management in the Eastern Metropolitan Council of Johannesburg, one of four local councils in the city of 3.5 million people. Basic issues of survival are more compelling than environmental concerns for the large population of urban poor, Venter said in a telephone interview from Johannesburg.

But guided by the experiences of waste management officials in Houston, Venter and her associates have developed a public awareness campaign to support a waste recycling program in Johannesburg.

"If you start trying to teach people about recycling, they're likely to start thinking about it at home, " Venter explained. Learning from the Houston experience, the Johannesburg waste management officials engaged in a partnership with a private company to start a "buy-back" program which has the dual benefit of recycling material and providing some income for unemployed urban poor.

"They collect paper for nothing, and they must bring it to a center where we will be paying them, say, 20 cents for a kilogram or something like that," Venter said. "All the people that are unemployed at the moment, it's using them and they are making some money out of it."

Venter said involvement in the Resource Cities program helped her develop a "total strategy" for waste collection which has led to an expansion of collections in previously unserved areas, public environmental education campaigns, and new recycling partnerships with the private sector.

For Houston's director of solid waste management, the Resource Cities program offered a rare opportunity to work with a community "in the midst of a total change from one society to another society." Everett Bass was eager to show his Johannesburg counterparts how diversity had become a strength in the government of his multicultural city. "It was important that they . . . have the opportunity to see people of color in management and decision-making positions, all up and down the solid waste management hierarchy."

Christa Venter acknowledged that Johannesburg entered Resource Cities at a time when managers were grappling with the transition from a "white-male dominant" management structure to a more inclusive system. Venter said her department is now changing after witnessing how Houston had made racial diversity a personnel asset in its waste management system. "Everyone is actually participating in decision-making -- it's not only coming from top management."

Reflecting on his involvement in Resource Cities, Bass said Johannesburg has made solid progress in improving its waste management system, but his own reward is no less significant. "Being an African American, it's really ... been heartwarming to be able to feel like you're being a part of creating the new South Africa. That's been just an indescribable delight, having the opportunity to participate."

Lusaka, Zambia, and Dayton, Ohio

Solid waste collection and disposal is one of the biggest problems in Lusaka, a city experiencing an unprecedented population expansion and its resulting problems of overcrowding, congestion and poor environmental living conditions. Illegal dumping is described as "rampant" in an ICMA report on the Lusaka-Dayton partnership because of the city's lack of equipment and resources to provide collection services in areas beyond the central markets and business districts.

"The situation now is much better than it was before," said Wilson Lungu in a telephone interview about his participation in the Resource Cities program. Developing a better overall management strategy for waste collection is one of the key lessons he took back to Zambia after observing operations of his counterparts in Dayton.

"If one has a good solid waste management system, you have to have good planning. Planning in terms of storage, in terms of collection, in terms of transport. If this planning is done, then a lot of things can fall into place," Lungu said.

Dayton city manager Lemmie saw Lusaka improve as a result of the Resource Cities partnership. "The city became much more effective in developing a process under which they would routinely collect trash and dispose of it."

Heightening citizen awareness about the health and environmental importance of proper waste disposal was another positive outcome, Lungu said. "People must be instructed on why they should handle garbage in this fashion or that fashion because if they are not aware, then it's another problem," Lungu explained. He said his department has now begun a public education campaign using brochures, radio announcements, and public meetings to help develop improved awareness. "The response and results we're getting are very encouraging."

One of the Lusaka innovations that most impressed Lemmie was how the Zambian officials worked to draw citizens and nongovernmental organizations into the process of reshaping the system for refuse collection and disposal. The Dayton official watched her Lusaka counterparts "working collectively in partnership to improve the environmental quality."

The Resource Cities program hasn't provided magic solutions to all of Lusaka's waste management problems, but Lungu now has clear goals on what his city needs to do: build a sanitary landfill site, and improve collections, transportation, equipment maintenance, and staff training.

For Valerie Lemmie and her Dayton colleagues, involvement in the Lusaka partnership resulted in a renewal of their commitment to serve their own communities. She also said the Dayton-Lusaka relationship will last well beyond the original Resource Cities grant that funded the partnership. "We have met folks that I think will be friends and partners with the city of Dayton forever."

Charlene Porter writes on global issues for the Office of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State