Kabul Citizens took to the Streets for Cleaning and Greening their City
Kabul, 15th April 2019. The capital city of Afghanistan, Kabul, launched today a cleaning and greening campaign with the aim of raising public awareness about the importance of waste management among citizens. The Mayor of the city, accompanied by municipality staff, wakili gozars and members of the community, took to the streets of Kabul and cleaned 16 districts of the capital city. The campaign, under the theme “My Kabul, your Kabul, our Clean and Green Kabul” gathered more 3,000 participants who collected garbage from all corners of the city. The cleaning and greening campaign is part of an annual activity led by the Sanitation Department of the municipality on the occasion of the beginning of the new Afghan year, Nowruz.
During the launching ceremony, the Mayor of Kabul, Mr. Ahmad Zaki Sarfaraz, insisted on the relevance of citizens’ engagement and collaboration with the municipality in waste reduction and the use of available collection points. Mr. Ahmad Zaki said that “Our city is our home and it is our duty as Muslims to achieve a clean environment”.
This initiative is technically supported by UN-Habitat’s Clean and Green City, a leading programme assisting Afghan municipalities in cleaning and greening activities in 12 Afghan cities including Kabul, Kandahar, Herat, Bamyan, Mazar-e-Sharif, Farah, Kunduz Charikar, Mehterlam, Jalalabad, Gardez, and Lashkargah.
The Director of the Sanitation Department, Mr. Ahmad Behzad Ghyasi, thanked UN-Habitat for its strategic partnership highlighting the relevance of public campaigns like this “as an important driver to enhance the culture of citizenship and local ownership”.
Since its launch in 2016, the programme has achieved impressive results with 49 parks upgraded and opened to the public in the above-mentioned cities; more than half a million trees planted across the country and more than 150,000 m3 of solid waste collected across all Afghanistan. The novelty of this programme is the creation of job opportunities for vulnerable sectors of the population, namely women, internally displaced and poor households. So far, more than 20,000 jobs were created equivalent to 2,602,769 job days.
The programme is funded by USAID and the EU. Recently, the government of Japan has signed an agreement for a one-year extension of the programme till mid-2020.
The Mayor of Kabul and the Director of Sanitation cleaning the streets of Kabul