On 1 June 2026, the Freetown City Council (FCC) formally signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Sierra Leone Police, marking the point at which a year-long experiment in urban waste management transformed from campaign into law. The Solid and Liquid Waste Collection Bylaws 2024, known by the hashtag #DortiMusGo, are now in full force and effect, with the FCC and police launching a joint enforcement effort to ensure compliance across all households, businesses, and institutions.
What the FCC is attempting in Freetown is genuinely ambitious: the digitisation, regulation, and modernisation of waste management in a West African capital city of over one million people, where waste has historically been collected by informal networks of labourers, dumped in unauthorised sites, and left to accumulate on streets and in waterways. Whether that ambition can survive contact with the reality of Freetown’s informal economy is an open question.
Freetown’s waste problem is not a hidden issue. It is visible on every street, in every gutter, along every waterway. Like many rapidly urbanising cities across Africa, Freetown faces a critical waste management challenge. The city generates thousands of tonnes of solid waste daily. Much of it is never collected. What is collected is often dumped at unauthorised sites, creating environmental hazards and public health risks.
The problem has multiple causes: insufficient municipal budgets, the absence of systematic collection routes, corruption in existing systems, and the unwillingness of residents to pay for services that have historically been provided (however inadequately) for free. Walking through Freetown’s neighbourhoods from Kroo Bay to Kingtom, from the east end to the periphery is to witness a city struggling under the weight of its own discarded material.
Into this reality, the FCC introduced the DortiMusGo initiative. The concept is elegant: formalise waste collection through public-private partnerships, digitise the entire process through a mobile app, divide the city into eight waste management blocks, require residents and businesses to register with approved providers, and enforce compliance through a joint enforcement team comprising the FCC, metropolitan police, and the judiciary. The theory is sound. Whether it survives the collision with Freetown’s economic realities is another matter entirely.
The initiative’s technological backbone is the DortiBox app, a mobile platform developed by Freetown Waste Transformers (FWT) with support from the GSMA Innovation Fund. The app enables residents to register, schedule pickups, make mobile money payments, and provide feedback on service delivery, automating operations and establishing a foundation for a more data-driven and responsive waste management system. FWT has also launched a USSD feature available through Orange mobile networks, designed to promote digitalisation for users with limited access to smartphones.
This is, by the standards of African urban development, genuinely innovative. For residents with smartphones, data access, and mobile money accounts, the system offers unprecedented convenience. You register, you schedule a pickup, you pay digitally, you track your collection. It is modern, transparent, and efficient.
But Freetown is not entirely a city of smartphone users with reliable data access and mobile money accounts. It is also a city of informal labourers the men and women who have historically pushed carts through neighbourhoods, collected waste from households, and earned irregular incomes from what they recovered and resold. The DortiMusGo bylaws do not explicitly address what happens to them.
Violations of the bylaws can attract fines of up to NLe 5,000, imprisonment of up to six months, or both. That penalty structure creates immediate pressure: residents and business owners will now face legal consequences for failing to use approved collection services. The question is whether that pressure will be applied uniformly or whether, as is often the case with enforcement in Freetown, it will fall most heavily on those with the least ability to pay.
The joint enforcement team is impressive on paper: the FCC, metropolitan police, Sierra Leone Police, and judiciary working in concert. In practice, enforcement depends on resources, political will, and the ability to make distinctions between genuine non-compliance and circumstantial inability to comply. Will the enforcement team penalise a family in a densely settled neighbourhood because the FCC-approved provider hasn’t yet established reliable service in their ward? Will they prosecute informal waste collectors who have lost their livelihoods because their services are no longer legal?
These are not academic questions. They are the difference between an initiative that genuinely improves urban life and one that concentrates the burden of change on those least equipped to bear it.
Part of what makes DortiMusGo distinctive is that it is not merely a collection and disposal system it is a waste-to-energy initiative. Freetown Waste Transformers operates waste-to-energy units that convert organic waste into electricity, heat, and fertiliser, with each installed transformer unit generating up to 150 kVA of electricity and double that amount in heat. For a nation where 76 percent of the population has no access to electricity, the potential to generate power from waste is significant.
The logic is compelling: waste is a resource. Instead of dumping it at Kingtom or Kissy the two approved dumpsites where it accumulates and rots Freetown could convert it into electricity for businesses, reducing energy costs and creating a genuine circular economy. In their pilot phase, FWT diverted 11.85 tonnes of organic waste from landfills and generated 12,205 kilowatt-hours of clean energy.
But scaling from pilot to city-wide operation is always where ambition collides with capacity. For waste-to-energy to work, the system needs large volumes of waste flowing reliably into processing facilities. The DortiMusGo bylaws are designed to create that flow by funneling waste through approved providers. Whether those providers have adequate processing capacity, whether residents will comply, and whether the system can actually capture the volume needed these remain open questions.
Over the past year, implementation has been uneven. The FCC launched a comprehensive city-wide communication campaign incorporating social media and traditional media, and has provided waste management tools to communities like Kroo Bay, training local youths to operate collection tricycles. Some wards have functional collection services. Others do not. Some residents have registered and adopted the digital system. Others remain skeptical or unable to access it.
The public notice issued this month formally announcing that the bylaws are now in full force signals that the campaign phase is over. Enforcement begins now. That is when the real test starts. How will the FCC respond when compliance is incomplete? How will enforcement teams navigate the gap between what the bylaws require and what residents can actually achieve? Will there be grace periods for wards where approved providers haven’t yet established service? Will informal waste collectors be integrated into the new system or simply displaced?
The DortiMusGo initiative represents something that African cities desperately need: systematic, modernised, equitable approaches to waste management. Freetown’s choice to digitise the system, link it to renewable energy, and create public accountability through an app-based platform is genuinely progressive. Mayor Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr has stated that the bylaws mark a milestone in the journey to improve waste management while creating cleaner communities, protecting the environment, and improving public health.
But the test of any such initiative is not what it promises it is what it delivers to the people who have the least power to shape it. For Freetown’s waste collectors, for families in wards without approved service providers, for residents who cannot navigate digital payment systems or afford registration fees, the DortiMusGo initiative will either be a pathway to better urban life or a constraint imposed from above.
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The next six months will tell which. If enforcement is rigorous and equitable, if informal collectors are integrated rather than displaced, if service coverage expands to cover all wards, and if residents see genuine improvements in waste collection and street cleanliness, then the initiative will be a model for African cities facing similar challenges. If enforcement becomes punitive against the powerless, if service gaps widen between wealthy and poor wards, and if the informal economy is simply criminalized, then DortiMusGo becomes another top-down urban intervention that failed to account for the people actually living in the city.
For now, the notice is posted. The bylaws are in force. Residents must register, pay, and comply. Whether that compliance actually produces the cleaner, healthier Freetown that the initiative promises that remains to be seen.
