When Western Indian Ocean nations meet in Tanzania ahead of COP 12 to the UNEP Nairobi Convention, the gathering will do more than mark four decades of regional cooperation to protect Africa’s coasts and seas. It will also sharpen attention on what it takes to confront marine pollution at scale. As the Nairobi Convention reflects on its 40-year journey, Sustainable Seas Trust chief executive officer Janine Osborne examines the lessons SST has drawn from its own 20 years of work building practical systems to tackle Africa’s waste and ocean pollution challenges.
Twenty years ago, Sustainable Seas Trust (SST) was established around a clear
and far-reaching goal: to conserve and protect Africa’s marine environment.
Like many conservation organisations of that period, we began by looking mainly
at the natural world. We wanted to understand marine ecosystems more deeply,
strengthen science, educate communities and help ensure that future generations
would inherit healthier oceans.
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In the two decades since,
our view of the problem has shifted profoundly. I no longer regard plastic
pollution — or waste in its wider sense — as chiefly an environmental issue.
It is, above all, a systems problem. And problems rooted in systems cannot be
solved by isolated action.
That conclusion was not
reached quickly. It took twenty years of research, implementation,
partnerships, setbacks, pauses for reflection and hard-won learning. It has
been shaped not only by SST’s own evolution, but also by a wider awakening
across Africa: durable environmental progress cannot be secured through
stand-alone projects, no matter how impressive they may look in the short term.
If our journey has
taught us one central lesson, it is this: systems change does not come from
taking a grassroots project that seems to work and simply making it bigger. It
comes from deliberately testing interventions in different settings, expecting
more of partnerships so they match the scale of the mission, strengthening the
evidence and learning systems as datasets expand and, ultimately, reshaping the
organisations tasked with changing the system itself. Nearly every other lesson
we have learned flows from that insight.
We stopped being a
beach-cleaning organisation.
For many people, marine
pollution is imagined as rubbish scattered across a shoreline. (These are also
the stories people most often share with me around a dinner table.) Yet beaches
are not where the crisis starts. Plastic finds its way into rivers well before
it reaches estuaries. Rivers reveal what is happening in communities, and
communities in turn reflect municipal systems, economic pressures, consumer
habits, education, infrastructure, markets and policy. The litter collected on
a beach is therefore the most visible sign of a far larger system under strain.
Cleaning the beach matters, but it does not, by itself, repair the system.
As our understanding
grew, our work had to change with it. We moved from concentrating on protecting
the ocean to preventing pollution from entering it in the first place. Today,
our programmes reach across the full waste value chain — from research and
monitoring to education, behaviour change, community participation, informal
sector inclusion, municipal collaboration and policy engagement. This was not
growth for growth’s sake. It was the natural result of seeing the problem more
clearly. Once waste is understood as a system, it becomes obvious that every
part of that system matters, and that every decision either reinforces or
undermines it.
Connected interventions
change systems, not isolated projects.
Development organisations
frequently speak about scaling projects that have succeeded. I am increasingly
persuaded that this is the wrong starting point. Projects are important, but
only when they are designed to strengthen the wider system around them. They
must be grounded in local knowledge, owned by communities and capable of
creating conditions that endure after the original investment has ended.
SST’s Operation Clean Spot (OCS) was designed with
that principle at its core. It is not a loose set of projects, but an
integrated delivery model that intentionally brings existing interventions
together because each serves a distinct purpose in the waste system. Research
produces evidence for better decisions. Education deepens understanding.
Community programmes create local ownership. Municipal engagement improves
governance. Capacity building supports implementation. Behaviour change helps
make impact last.
No single intervention
can carry that burden alone. Working together, however, they reinforce one
another and improve the efficiency of the system as a whole.
The same logic guides
Munch, our school-based behaviour change programme within OCS. It is often
seen simply as an education initiative, but at SST we understand education to
be only one element of its purpose and design. Schools were chosen deliberately
because they are trusted community institutions that already exist. Behaviour
learned there shapes future choices and also reaches into households; those
households influence communities, and communities, in time, influence the waste
system itself. The classroom is not the end point. It is a sustained entry
point into wider systems change.
Across time, three
principles have stood out as the basis of every intervention we design.
First, reliable data. We
cannot solve problems that we do not understand properly.
Second, local ownership.
Sustainable change cannot be handed down to communities. It has to be built
with them and for them.
Third, capacity. Without
the skills, institutions and confidence to act, even strong interventions
eventually lose momentum and disappear.
These are not competing
priorities. They are connected parts of the same system.
Intentional partnerships
underpin successful interventions.
It is often said that
collaboration is vital. I agree. But collaboration on its own is not enough.
SST has always valued
partnerships. What has changed is the way we define them. Instead of asking
only who wants to work with us, we now ask who must be part of the system for
meaningful change to happen. Our Theory of Change has made us far more
intentional about identifying the role each stakeholder is uniquely placed to
play, clarifying the value we create for one another and building partnerships
around those complementary strengths.
Municipalities help
create enabling environments. Researchers build the evidence base. Communities
bring local leadership. Businesses shape production and consumption. Educators
influence future behaviour. Civil society links people, knowledge and action.
Our aim is no longer
collaboration for its own sake. It is to strengthen the
contribution each actor makes to the performance of the wider system. This has
changed how we work, not only in South Africa but increasingly across Africa
through relationships with regional organisations such as WIOMSA, the Nairobi
Convention and others, where practical and transferable implementation
experience is becoming as important as policy dialogue.
The hardest evolution
happened inside our own organisation.
The greatest surprise for
me in the past five years has been this: as our understanding of the waste
system changed, SST itself had to change too. In hindsight, that sounds
obvious. Living through it was far more difficult.
When I joined SST five
years ago, it was a committed organisation full of talented people doing work
that mattered. At the time, I assumed passion and technical skill would
naturally become organisational excellence. I was wrong.
As our ambitions
expanded, I came to understand that asking people to address increasingly
complex social challenges required more than dedication to a cause. It required
proper investment in the people responsible for delivering the work. One of
our earliest decisions was to benchmark salaries and include fair remuneration
in our long-term funding model. Passion should never be used as a reason to
expect people to shoulder extraordinary responsibility without the support and
recognition they deserve.
I still remember sitting
in front of spreadsheets while preparing the second phase of our Norwegian
funding proposal. My instinct was to keep salaries low. I feared that asking
for more might threaten our chances of securing core funding, and that every
additional dollar spent on people would mean one less dollar for programmes.
But the more I considered what we were asking from our team, the more I knew I
had to be brave and ask for — and justify — what I believed was necessary. We
were asking people to solve increasingly complex societal problems while
expecting personal sacrifice to compensate for organisational gaps. That was
when I understood that investing in people was not separate from the mission;
it was central to achieving the change we wanted to see in society.
Yet remuneration proved
to be only one part of a far larger puzzle. So, I was wrong again.
As our work became more
integrated and more focused on systems, we also had to revisit leadership,
accountability, organisational design, monitoring and evaluation, data
governance and culture. We had to move beyond building programmes and start
building an organisation able to sustain those programmes over time.
Perhaps the most
difficult lesson was accepting that technical excellence is not enough on its
own. Work across complex systems demands a strong sense of self, intellectual
humility, emotional maturity, professional discipline, a commitment to
continuous learning and the capacity to collaborate across cultures,
disciplines, sectors and institutions. Those qualities matter every bit as much
as scientific expertise.
Creating that kind of
organisation is hard. It requires uncomfortable conversations, tough decisions
and the willingness to pause at times while always remaining ready to adapt.
But I have come to believe that organisations cannot transform complex systems
unless they are also prepared to transform themselves.
Africa does not need a
saviour. It needs balanced partnerships.
Earlier this year, I
attended the Our Ocean Conference in Mombasa, where governments, researchers,
development agencies and civil society organisations gathered to consider the
future of the oceans. One thought stayed with me long after I returned home:
Africa is not lacking ideas, expertise or implementation experience. What it
needs are partnerships that recognise these skills and assets and help
strengthen them.
Many of the systems-based
approaches now drawing international interest are already being designed,
tested and improved across Africa. Every day, African organisations are
producing evidence, building local ownership, strengthening capacity and
showing practical implementation models shaped by African realities. We are not
waiting for solutions to arrive from somewhere else.
At SST, we see this in
our own work. Our African Waste Academy now provides training in multiple
languages, including English, French, Portuguese, isiZulu and isiXhosa, while
our partnerships across Africa continue to support the movement of knowledge
and implementation experience between countries and regions. These are not
only knowledge-sharing efforts; they are part of building Africa’s own capacity
to solve African challenges.
Africa is not merely
putting global ideas into practice. Increasingly, it is generating, testing and
refining those ideas itself. That should give us confidence — not because the
problem has been solved, but because we have built something equally valuable:
practical experience that can travel.
The next twenty years.
I often think about how
much SST has changed during the past two decades. In truth, the organisation
has not moved away from its founding purpose. We are still working toward
healthier oceans and healthier communities in Africa. What has changed is our
understanding of how that future can be achieved, and what has become sharper
is our distinctive role in helping to make it possible.
We have learned that
environmental challenges are seldom environmental alone; they are also social,
economic, behavioural and institutional. The more deeply we understood the
waste system, the less our work was about waste alone and the more it became
about people, institutions, partnerships, evidence and leadership.
That is my single biggest
lesson from the past twenty years: if we are serious about transforming waste
systems across Africa, we must be as deliberate in designing our organisations
as we are in designing our interventions. Systems change is not something we
simply apply to the world around us. It is something we must first become
capable of delivering within our own organisations. The mission demands it.
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About the Author:
Janine Osborne is the Chief Executive Officer at Sustainable
Seas Trust (SST).
SST is a science-based organisation working to protect Africa’s seas and
communities for the benefit of all who live on the continent.
