Private sector involvement in waste management of metropolises: Insights from Dhaka city

Abstract

Privatization of municipal solid waste management has been widely studied for both developing and developed countries, producing evidence both for and against privatization. This research reiterates the importance of one of the largest megacities in the world – Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh – as a case study on this topic, and further nuances the debate about the role of privatization in municipal waste management. The focus is on one of its municipalities, the Dhaka North City Corporation (DNCC), where we provide comparative analysis of municipal solid waste collection and transportation between a total of 36 privatized and non-privatized administrative units. Landfill weigh-bridge data on monthly net weight of waste, number of sweepers, secondary transfer stations and vehicle data was collected from the DNCC for 36 consecutive months from 2017 January to 2019 December, and analyses were run using 30 months’ data till June. Fixed effects and “hybrid” random-effects regressions were run on the panel dataset to estimate both within-cluster and between-cluster effects. The results indicate that administrative units with privatized waste management have significantly higher waste collection on average, which can be explained by a higher number of high capacity dump trucks, though wider economic and demographic factors may be partly driving the difference. In-depth interviews with city corporation officials and contractors also provided valuable information on employment conditions. It is found that wages and benefits of sweepers under private contract are much lower. Moreover, since most sweepers are female, a gendered effect of privatization is evident.