Budget sheets and buy-in: financing community-based waste management in Siem Reap, Cambodia

Abstract

This paper details some of the diffi culties in fi nancing a communitybased waste management (CBWM) project for the collection of waste in Siem Reap, Cambodia. It presents a series of fi nancing scenarios based on several potential logistical arrangements. The fi nancial variables investigated include labour costs and honorariums, collection fees, charges for secondary collection, land and equipment costs, and educational programmes. The case study illustrates how the loss of a political champion and a lack of cooperation by a private waste collection company derailed the fi nancing of a CBWM project despite the presence of other favourable conditions for its success. The waste collection company's participation was fundamental to ensuring the affordability of secondary waste collection, and this one fi nancial element greatly affected the feasibility of the entire system. The paper concludes that without buy-in and fi nancial cooperation from all stakeholders, the best laid plans for CBWM (and the accompanying budget sheets) are rendered irrelevant.KEYWORDS Cambodia / community-based waste management / project fi nancing / Siem Reap / waste collection I. THE RESEARCH PROJECTIt has been estimated that up to 50 per cent of residents in low-and middleincome countries do not receive waste collection services.(1) Such is the case in the town of Siem Reap, Cambodia (Figure 1), where only 50 per cent of the town's garbage is collected daily.(2) In some places, communities have been able to self-organize in order to offer waste management services to local residents. From the spring of 2004 to the summer of 2005, the authors were part of a research team that assessed the feasibility of a communitybased waste management (CBWM) system in an area of the town of Siem Reap that did not receive municipal waste collection services.Waste collection services, contracted to a private waste hauler (MICC), are provided by the municipality to only the central part of the town. There are a number of reasons for this arrangement. First, the municipality cannot afford to provide service to all residents. For residents who are outside the service area, there are substantial costs associated with transporting their own waste to the municipal dumpsite (approximately 10 kilometres from town) and paying the tipping fees, which are prohibitively expensive for anyone other than MICC. Second, outside of the central town, the poor quality of local infrastructure limits truck access to houses. Most roads in

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