Pro-Informal workers and associations in Lagos State have called on the State government to desist from any plans to scrap waste pickers in Lagos State.
This demand was made in a press release signed by Deji Akinpelu, co-founder of Re-thinking Cities, as the Association of Scrap and waste Pickers of Lagos (ASWOL) launched a website to verify waste pickers in Lagos State.
The website https://aswol.org which was built with the support of Rethinking Cities and Heinrich Böll Stiftung is aimed at helping the government and the public to verify and track the operations of waste pickers in Lagos.
Akinplelu said, “We don’t need to ban operations of informal waste pickers; we can rather semi-formalize them through forming associations and using technology to deploy and track their services.”
He also mentioned that the unveiling of aswol.org is one of the steps in integrating informal waste pickers in the waste management sector in Lagos, which Rethinking Cities has strongly advocated for over the years.
Aswol.org is a platform through which the public can verify a registered waste picker. The website is a user-friendly website for members of the public to interact with and verify the authenticity of any waste picker operating in Lagos.
The website will serve as a resource centre for any information relating to waste and scrap dealers in the state, thereby strengthening the waste and scrap dealers’ networks at the international, regional, national and local levels.