When Janine Osborne took the helm of Sustainable Seas Trust (SST) five years ago, she inherited an organisation with a proud legacy: two decades of protecting Africa’s marine environments, educating coastal communities, and removing tonnes of plastic from beaches across the continent. But she also inherited a nagging question that would fundamentally reshape the organisation’s future.
Why were the beaches still full of plastic?
“Beaches are not where marine pollution begins; they are simply where it becomes most visible,” Osborne tells East Africa Business Times from SST’s Nelson Mandela Bay headquarters. “Plastic enters rivers long before it reaches an estuary, and rivers only reflect what is happening upstream in communities, municipal systems, consumer behaviour, markets, education and policy.”
That realisation—that beach cleanups were treating symptoms rather than causes—has driven one of the most significant strategic pivots in African environmentalism. Today, SST operates across the full waste value chain: from research and education to informal sector inclusion, municipal collaboration, and policy engagement. It’s a shift that holds profound lessons for businesses, governments, and development partners across the continent.
The Systems Problem
For Osborne, waste is fundamentally a systems problem rather than simply an environmental one. And Africa’s systems are under strain from multiple directions simultaneously: rapid urbanisation and population growth outpacing infrastructure, fragmented and under-resourced municipal services, and an informal sector that does most of the actual collection and recovery work but remains largely unrecognised and unsupported.
“The solution must be holistic, not fragmented, mirroring the very system it’s trying to fix,” she argues. “Yet many organisations working in this space design and deliver in isolation rather than building on what others are already doing. Too often there’s more appeal, more ‘bragging rights’, in starting something new than in strengthening an existing initiative.”
This duplication, she warns, is inefficient and wastes resources the sector cannot afford to lose.
So where should intervention begin? Osborne points to two priorities: formal recognition and strengthening of the informal collection sector, and building baseline data that most African cities still lack.
“In most African cities, the informal sector is already doing more of the recovery work than the formal system, whether or not it’s recognised,” she says. “And you cannot design, fund or evaluate an intervention against a system you can’t measure.”
Operation Clean Spot
SST’s flagship programme, Operation Clean Spot (OCS), embodies this systems-thinking approach. Launched across three South African metros—Nelson Mandela Bay, Cape Town, and eThekwini—it brings together research, education, community participation, municipal engagement, capacity building, and behaviour change in a single, connected framework.
“Research generates the evidence that tells you where and why leakage is happening,” Osborne explains. “Education builds understanding and shifts behaviour from the classroom outward into households and communities. Community participation ensures local ownership. Municipal engagement strengthens governance. Each does something useful individually. Together, they reinforce one another and tighten the efficiency of the whole system.”
The evidence base is substantial. FY26 saw SST run OCS concurrently across the three metros, supported by 32 new quantitative litter surveys and nearly 3,000 perception surveys layered onto data collected since 2019. This longitudinal, cross-context evidence base allows the organisation to distinguish which design principles hold across very different municipal environments from those requiring local adaptation.
Through this work, Osborne has identified three foundations for sustainable interventions: good data, local ownership, and institutional capacity. All three, she stresses, need to be built in parallel rather than sequentially.
On data, the practical starting point is establishing simple, consistent baselines and waste flows. SST’s own African Litter Monitoring Manual, freely available at sst.org.za—sets out standardised methodologies for collecting comparable data across different operating environments.
On local ownership, the shift required is treating communities as co-designers from the outset rather than simply beneficiaries. “Behaviour learned and owned at a community level, for example through school-based programmes, is what sustains change long after donor funding ends,” Osborne says.
On institutional capacity, this means deliberate investment in training and supporting local organisations and municipal officials. SST’s African Waste Academy, which now offers training in five languages, is a practical vehicle for this. “Capacity and ownership take years, not months, to establish,” she emphasises.
The Partnership Paradox
Partnerships are central to SST’s approach, but Osborne is candid about their limitations. “Collaboration is often treated as an end in itself, but bringing people into a room is not the same as building a functioning system.”
The shift in approach has been to start by asking who needs to be part of the system for meaningful change to happen, and what each actor is uniquely positioned to contribute, rather than simply who wants to work with us. Municipalities create the enabling environment and regulatory backbone.
Researchers generate the evidence that informs decisions. Communities provide local leadership and legitimacy. Businesses influence what gets produced and consumed, including through mechanisms like Extended Producer Responsibility.
“None of these roles substitutes for another, and none is sufficient alone,” Osborne says. SST’s Theory of Change has made the organisation far more deliberate about mapping these roles explicitly for every partnership it enters.
Increasingly, this extends beyond South Africa through regional bodies such as the Abidjan and Nairobi Conventions, where SST’s practical, tested implementation experience is proving as valuable as policy dialogue itself.
Internal Transformation
Perhaps the most revealing lesson from Osborne’s tenure concerns organisational transformation—a topic she describes as the one she underestimated most.
“I assumed that passionate, technically strong people would naturally produce organisational excellence,” she admits. “And I was wrong. Asking people to solve increasingly complex, long-term societal challenges requires investing properly in them, not simply trusting that passion alone will sustain them.”
One of the first hard decisions was to benchmark salaries and build fair remuneration into long-term funding proposals, even when every instinct said to keep costs modest to protect chances of securing funding. But remuneration was only one part of a much bigger shift. As SST’s work became more integrated and systems-focused, the organisation had to rethink leadership development, accountability structures, data governance, and organisational culture.
It now tracks 173 indicators through its monitoring, evaluation and learning framework, ensuring that evidence—not personal bias or instinct—drives decisions.
“Technical excellence and commitment to mission are not enough,” Osborne argues. “Organisations need the same discipline in leadership, governance, data stewardship and people investment that they expect of their programmes, and they need to be willing to have uncomfortable conversations about their own capability gaps.”
One unexpected lesson surfaced through remuneration conversations during recruitment processes. “Candidates who could clearly and professionally say ‘the mission aligns with me, but the salary doesn’t’ were displaying exactly the skill our organisation needs internally: the ability to be honest about capacity and trade-offs rather than defaulting to over-accommodation.”
NGOs, in her experience, too often operate from scarcity—saying yes to every request, every late deadline, every funder ask—because they’re afraid that boundaries will read as a lack of commitment to the cause. “The opposite is true,” she insists. “Protecting time, capacity and accountability—our own and other people’s—is not selfishness. It’s what makes an organisation and its people capable of sustaining the mission rather than slowly burning out in service of it.”
A New Model for Partnership
Osborne is unequivocal about what African organisations need from international partners: balanced partnerships, not saviours.
“Africa is not short of ideas, expertise or implementation experience,” she says. “What’s often missing is a partnership model that recognises that.”
International donors and development agencies can support African ownership by funding organisational capability and not only projects. “Multi-year core funding builds the institutions that make long-term systems change possible, whereas short project cycles keep organisations perpetually in survival mode.”
They can also insist on genuine co-design rather than importing pre-built models and expecting local adaptation to happen afterwards, and they can back the transfer of implementation experience between African organisations and countries directly, rather than routing it primarily through external intermediaries.
At SST, the African Waste Academy and growing regional partnerships—including technical contributions to the Abidjan and Nairobi Conventions—exist precisely because African organisations are already generating, testing and refining solutions suited to African realities.
“What we need from international partners is investment that strengthens that capacity and lets African organisations lead the implementation of it, rather than financial support that positions Africa as a recipient of solutions developed elsewhere.”
The Next 20 Years
Looking ahead, meaningful systems change in Africa’s waste and marine pollution landscape would look like African-led delivery models tested across enough different contexts to be genuinely scalable, sitting alongside policy frameworks built for African realities rather than adapted from elsewhere. It would mean comparable waste data and monitoring becoming standard practice across municipalities and countries. And it would mean the informal sector appropriately recognised and included into national waste systems.
To get there, Osborne identifies three requirements: patient, multi-year core investment in organisational capability and vision alongside programme funding; partnership with regional platforms that help translate policy into local implementation while respecting different contexts; and a genuine shift in how success is measured—from whether individual projects performed well to whether the underlying system is functioning better because of them.
“This will take patience most funding cycles don’t currently allow for,” she acknowledges. “But the twenty years since SST was founded, and especially the five years during which I’ve been at the helm, have convinced me that this is the only way lasting change happens. Not by scaling isolated projects and hoping they will succeed, but by designing and building the systems, evidence and institutions capable of sustaining change long after any single project ends.”
Sustainable Seas Trust was founded in 2006 by Dr Tony Ribbink. For more information on its programmes and the African Litter Monitoring Manual, visit sst.org.za.
