Prayer request from Joel Tembo Vwira
Dear Friends. Hope that you are all doing well. Please receive my prayers requests: In five days we will haveContinue reading…
Joel Tembo Vwira
Joel Tembo Vwira is a social-business entrepreneur living in goma. he recognised a social need and business solution to the growing problem of waste disposal in the war raveaged town of Goma, North Eastern DRC. He established waste and services company that collects and recycles waste as a viable business tha also has significant social benefits. Joel is now looking at how to expand his social enterprise to other african cities.
Joel Tembo Vwira is a gradutate of the University of Goma with a business degree. He is leading a movement to clean Goma.
Growing up, Joel passed by a mountain of trash that all his neighbors produced and dumped at the corner of the street. Joel was always sad to see the neighborhood kids play in it, get sick, and he was always sadden about how his beloved city looked and the health implications of piles of trash on every street. He was also sadden by the fact the church didn’t do anything to clean the city - not even on the street where they worshipped every week. The government did little to tackle the problem, sending one truck per 6 months to take away trash, but that would not put a dent in the mountains of trash. He was concerned about waste management in Goma, and determined to do something about it.
After competing school, Joel figured that he could address the waste management problem in Goma. He had two ideas for approaching the problem, recruiting the church and starting a waste management business. First, he mobilized his church to do something about the trash. Every weekend, he would lead the youth in picking up trash from the dump on the street. Then he created a business to address the source of the trash - local homes and commercial businesses. The company provided trash cans to theses homes and businesses so that rather than adding to the mountain of trash, they would fill their can, which would be picked up each week by a garbage truck. So little by little, the mountain of trash disappeared as the church emptied the dump and no new trash was added to the pile. Joel did what the government could not do - clean up the streets of Goma!
