Zero Waste Day in Bukavu: Young Congolese Volunteers Take the Climate Fight to the Market

On 4 April 2026, around thirty young Congolese volunteers gathered at the Kamagema market in Bukavu, in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, with sacks, gloves, and a simple goal for the morning: clear the grounds of waste and show their neighbours that climate action begins on the street outside your own door.

The cleanup was organised by the Congo-DRC Youth Community Network (RCJC-DRC) to mark International Zero Waste Day under the theme “Fighting Food Waste and Promoting Sustainable Food Systems.”  In the spirit of the YWF #SaveEarth campaign, this event aimed to turn abstract climate conversations into concrete Saturday morning work.

Participants included students, market vendors, community leaders and volunteers from across the city, pulled together through Facebook, WhatsApp, posters at the market, and direct invitations carried by local partner organisations. Volunteers carried hand-lettered signs that put the day’s argument in plain French: zero waste is not an option but a necessity, and the best waste is the waste we never produce in the first place.

The morning opened with an awareness session on the links between food waste, poor waste management, public health and the environment. Then the sleeves came up. Over about three hours, bags filled steadily with plastic and organic matter until the pile itself became an argument: this is what a single market produces in a week, this is what a handful of young people can lift in a morning, and this is what institutions should be taking seriously. One sign held up by a young volunteer caught the spirit of the day. Reducing our waste, it read, is how we protect our future. Let us commit together to a cleaner and healthier community.

Like much grassroots work in the region, the day ran into real constraints. There were not enough gloves or heavy-duty bags, which limited how much the team could sort and remove. Some community members remained detached from the environmental message. Thin funding kept the activity smaller than the organisers had hoped. Even so, roughly fifteen new people signed up to join the network after seeing the work first-hand, drawn in, the report noted, by the concrete nature of the action rather than speeches.

It is tempting to look at a cleanup in one market and treat it as local housekeeping. That reading misses the point. The Congo Basin is the world’s second-largest tropical rainforest and a climate anchor for the planet. Eastern DRC sits inside one of the most ecologically significant and climate-vulnerable regions on Earth. Food waste is a major source of methane, the greenhouse gas heating the atmosphere fastest in the short term. Uncollected plastic from a market in Bukavu moves into drains, into the Ruzizi river system, and eventually into Lake Kivu, which millions of people rely on for water, fish, and livelihoods. A Saturday at Kamagema is not a side story to the global climate fight. It is one frontline of it.

This is also where the case for world federalism lands in practical terms. Climate change is the textbook problem no single nation can solve on its own, and yet it is won or lost community by community. If local volunteers in South Kivu carry the burden of awareness, sorting, and cleanup with little more than social media posts and borrowed gloves, something is broken in the way the world shares responsibility. World federalists argue for a democratic, accountable global system with the authority and resources to meet collective problems like climate and waste head-on. The young people of RCJC-DRC are already doing the civic work of a planetary community. They deserve institutions that match their ambition.

The network is not stopping at one event. RCJC-DRC is planning educational workshops in schools and local markets on reducing food waste and improving waste management, along with regular community cleanups designed to hold momentum rather than spike once a year. The team is asking for more equipment, stronger partnerships with local authorities, and the kind of sustained support that treats environmental work as serious civic infrastructure rather than a one-off charity project.

Young World Federalists exists to back exactly this kind of youth-led organising, from Bukavu to Lilongwe, Kaduna, Nairobi, and beyond. For 2.50 USD a month or 10 USD a year, anyone can become a YWF member and help fund the next Saturday morning at Kamagema.