Africa’s waste systems are not one story. This explorer brings together World Bank What a Waste 3.0 data for 54 African countries, covering waste generation, collection, composition, treatment and projections to 2050.
Choose a country or income group to explore the data, compare it with broader averages, and open the source details behind individual figures. Missing observations remain visible as missing rather than being filled in.
Explore municipal solid waste across Africa using World Bank What a Waste 3.0 data. Compare countries and income groups, inspect waste composition and treatment, and follow harmonised projections to 2050.
2022 is the common harmonised baseline. Reported/source observations may come from different years and are labelled separately.
2022 waste snapshot
WAW3 harmonised baselineWaste composition
Waste treatment and disposal
Collection coverage
WAW3 reports collection using different denominators: households, population, and waste mass. This explorer keeps those measures separate rather than collapsing them into one “collection rate”.
Waste generation to 2050
WAW3 projectionsMSW per-capita ranking
kg/person/day
View as table
Show copy-friendly country table
Methodology & sources
Show methodology
Source: World Bank What a Waste 3.0 country dataset (2026), licensed CC BY 4.0.
Percentages: The World Bank workbook stores percentage fields as fractions from 0–1. The plugin normalises them to 0–100 for display.
Missing observations: Missing composition, collection, and treatment values remain missing. They are not imputed.
Regional/income profiles: Aggregate composition and treatment profiles are weighted using 2022 municipal-waste generation for countries where each component is reported, then normalised for chart readability. Coverage is shown alongside the chart.
Projections: 2022 is the World Bank harmonised baseline; 2030, 2040, and 2050 values are projections and are not presented as reported observations.
What Africa’s waste data shows
Across the 54 countries in this explorer, the WAW3 harmonised 2022 baseline totals about 237 million tonnes of municipal solid waste per year. The same country-level projections reach about 571 million tonnes by 2050 — roughly 140% above the 2022 baseline.
2022 baseline
≈237 million tonnes
Combined annual municipal waste across the 54 countries in the explorer.
2050 projection
≈571 million tonnes
WAW3’s projected annual total using the same country set.
Projected growth
+140%
Increase from the harmonised 2022 baseline to the 2050 projection.
The data also shows why country-level detail matters. Per-capita waste generation varies sharply across the continent, while source coverage is uneven: composition data is available for 35 of the 54 countries, treatment or disposal data for 29, and at least one collection measure for 42. The explorer keeps those gaps visible so stronger and weaker evidence are not presented as equivalent.
Data note: the continental figures above are sums of the country-level WAW3 harmonised/projection values used by this explorer; they are not presented as a single reported continental observation.
Explore waste data by region
All six regional explorers use the same WAW3-based Unsustainable Data Explorers platform, distinguishing source-reported observations from the harmonised 2022 baseline and future projections.