South African organization to remove 100,000 liters of toxic waste from Lake Victoria

A South African environmental and human rights advocacy organization, has pledged to clean up Lake Victoria from toxic waste, including polythene and plastic materials.

The Saad Kassis-Mohamed Center based in Cape Town, intends to foot the bill of clearing 100,000 liters of plastic waste and microplastic-bearing debris from the continent’s largest freshwater body.

However, the exercise is solely for the Ugandan shoreline of Lake Victoria, as part of the Center’s one-million-liter global conservation campaign.

Lake Victoria is the world’s largest tropical lake and the second-largest freshwater lake on Earth by surface area.

The 69,485-square-kilometre body of water is shared by Uganda, Kenya, and Tanzania.

It is also the source of the River Nile, which leaves the lake at Jinja and flows nearly 6,700 kilometres to the Mediterranean Sea.

Saad Kassis-Mohamed, Chairman of the Saad Kassis-Mohamed Center, said the plastic entering the lake at a fishing village in Uganda does not stay there, but rather gets carried across borders and, eventually, flows into the sea.

This commitment is about protecting that source, at a moment when Uganda itself is taking renewed legislative steps to address the problem.”

Marcine Graham, Executive Director, Saad Kassis-Mohamed Center called on the governments of Uganda, Kenya, and Tanzania, alongside international partners and the private sector, to invest in coordinated waste management across the Lake Victoria basin and to support the enforcement of Uganda’s pending single-use plastics legislation.

The 100,000-litre commitment to Lake Victoria forms part of the Center’s broader pledge to remove one million liters of ocean-bound plastic and waterborne debris from critically affected sites worldwide.

The Saad Kassis-Mohamed Center is an initiative of the WeCare Foundation, Cape Town, active across Africa, South Asia, the Gulf region, and beyond. 

Estimates of the population directly dependent on the lake for water, food, and livelihoods range from 40 million to more than 42 million people across the three bordering countries.

The lake’s fishery is one of the most economically significant inland fisheries in the world.

 Victoria directly employs an estimated 100,000 people, with more than 2 million more involved in related trade and processing activities.

Catches from Lake Victoria account for more than 60 percent of the total fish catches in both Kenya and Uganda, and fish supplies more than 60 percent of household dietary protein in Uganda, according to figures from the East African Community’s Lake Victoria Environmental Management Project.

The lake’s Nile perch export industry, which processes and fillets fish for international markets, depends entirely on water quality and fish stocks that plastic pollution and eutrophication continue to threaten.

Plastic is not the lake’s only documented environmental crisis, but it compounds a set of pressures researchers have tracked for decades.

Water hyacinth, an invasive aquatic weed first recorded in Lake Victoria in 1989, has at points covered enough of the lake’s surface to block sunlight, reduce dissolved oxygen, and disrupt fishing, water transport, and hydroelectric power generation at the Nalubaale and Kiira dams near Jinja.

Economic losses from hyacinth infestation to transportation and fisheries alone have been estimated at approximately US$ 350 million per year, regionally, with economic activity at Kenya’s Kisumu port falling by as much as 70 percent during years of peak infestation.

Peer-reviewed research has also documented the scale of the lake’s plastic burden specifically.

A 2020 study of surface water in northern Lake Victoria, led by researchers including Robert Egesa and Angella Nankabirwa, found that polyethylene from bags, wrappers, and films accounted for 60 percent of the microplastic particles analyzed, the single largest contributor identified.

A separate 2021 scientific expedition aboard the Flipflopi, a dhow built from recycled plastic, tested 13 locations across the lake’s three bordering countries and recorded microplastics at every site, with more than 60 percent of the 29,000-plus fragments collected classified as microplastic.

Earlier monitoring has found that roughly one in five fish sampled from the lake had ingested plastic.

The scale of the problem on the Ugandan side of the lake is driven in large part by the country’s struggle to manage plastic waste on land.

Uganda generates an estimated 600 metric tons of plastic waste daily, according to the National Environment Management Authority (NEMA), of which less than 40 percent is properly collected and managed; the remainder is routinely dumped in drainage channels, wetlands, and water bodies including Lake Victoria.

Kampala alone is estimated to produce around 100 metric tonnes of plastic waste each day.

The country has attempted to ban lightweight plastic bags, known locally as Kaveera, on five separate occasions since 2007, each time without effective enforcement; NEMA is now finalizing a sixth attempt at a total ban on single-use plastics, alongside a newly approved excise levy on plastic products, as part of a renewed push to address the flooding and pollution the bags cause in Kampala and other urban centres.

Uganda spends an estimated 10 billion Ugandan shillings annually simply clearing plastic waste from drainage channels.

The human cost of the pollution is concentrated along the lake’s shoreline.

At landing sites including Ggaba, Kasensero, Lambu, and Port Bell, fishermen and traders contend daily with plastic bottles, polythene bags, and discarded fishing gear washing in with the catch.

In the Greater Masaka region, researchers have linked the plastic burden to rising child labor, as children skip school to collect and sell plastic waste in support of their families.

The pollution has also raised the cost of producing clean drinking water: Kampala’s National Water and Sewerage Corporation has had to shift its lake water intake further from shore and change its treatment chemicals in response to deteriorating water quality near the city.

Lake Victoria’s plastic burden is not Uganda’s alone.

Much of the waste reaching the southern Ugandan shore at Kasensero arrives via the Kagera River, which carries debris from Rwanda, Burundi, and Tanzania before emptying into the lake.

In 2021, Uganda became the first landlocked African country to join the United Nations Clean Seas Campaign, committing to address plastic pollution in its lakes and rivers as a contribution to the health of the ocean those waterways ultimately feed.

The Center’s commitment is intended to support that effort directly, alongside the renewed legislative and regional momentum now building around the lake’s protection.