@case {1372174, title = {The {\textquotedblleft}Garbage Lady{\textquotedblright} Cleans Up Kampala: Turning Quick Wins Into Lasting Change}, year = {2020}, abstract = {

Lisa Cox and Jorrit de Jong, May 2020\ 

In 2011, at the newly formed Kampala Capital City Authority (KCCA), Judith Tumusiime, an impassioned technocrat who prided herself on operating outside of politics, was charged with transforming a {\textquotedblleft}filthy city{\textquotedblright} to a clean, habitable, and healthy one. Early in her tenure, she was able to vastly improve Kampala{\textquoteright}s solid waste management (SWM) system by creating efficiencies, increasing accountability, and bringing her technical know-how to a team that held little expertise. But by 2015, after several years of strong momentum, Tumusiime felt that her progress was stalling, and she faced political challenges around creating a sustainable SWM system.

More specifically, her team was grossly overextended and needed to assign some of its SWM responsibilities to private contractors through an innovative public-private partnership (PPP). To ensure that the PPP was viable, Tumusiime strongly believed that all residents, no matter their income, needed to pay fees for garbage collection. However, the federal and local elections were approaching in February 2016, and politicians had told their constituents that they would not allow garbage collection fees, leaving Tumusiime with little support for her long-term vision. She was faced with a challenge: she could either dive into a political world that she had never wanted anything to do with to see if she could achieve radical change, or she could continue to make tweaks that might achieve short-term, small improvements at a slow{\textemdash}and even halting{\textemdash}pace.

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}, url = {https://www.cityleadership.harvard.edu/cases/the-garbage-lady-cleans-up-kampala-turning-quick-wins-into-lasting-change}, author = {Lisa Cox and Jorrit de Jong} }