Toolkit for people:
In brief
The project involved the piloting of a civic technology toolkit, designed by the Economy and Sustainability Association (EStà), to improve the socio-economic and environmental impacts of waste management through participatory methods.
The ‘Toolkit for People’ application provided local institutions with an overview of the circular economy’s impacts on the local area and a framework for developing future scenarios, thereby becoming a policy development tool. To generate these overviews and scenarios and to engage with the project’s beneficiary citizens and local institutions, the toolkit comprises:
- A mapping tool to study local resources;
- An impact calculation tool;
- A facilitation tool for sharing results and developing improvement practices.
The toolkit was tested in the Senegalese village of Elinkine, where the NGO Fondazione ACRA operates, ensuring the local population’s participation in the trial through the secondary school.
The strength of Toolkit for People lies in the connection between social innovation and technological innovation through dialogue with the local context. The feature that makes it replicable is its modular nature: it can be broken down into individual tools or implemented in its entirety, depending on the specific needs of the area. Toolkit for People offers services for the application of civic technology on issues that integrate social, environmental and economic dimensions; when broken down, each tool represents a specific service adaptable to any context. The mapping and calculation tools offer a service to local institutions, municipal or private companies specialising in environmental services, NGOs, and third-sector organisations working on the circular economy; in contrast, the facilitation tool is designed specifically for dialogue between NGOs and local institutions and can be offered to both parties.
Toolkit for people:
Objectives
- To map and analyse waste management in the area through a participatory process involving collaboration with teachers and pupils at Elinkine secondary school during citizenship lessons, in order to identify the resources currently available in terms of: people, skills, figures, actions, practices and policies;
- To calculate parameters for drawing up a snapshot of the socio-economic and environmental impacts of the local urban circular economy, using the data collected during the first mapping phase, in order to formulate proposals and devise effective solutions, in line with the circular economy model;
- Facilitate good relations and constructive dialogue with local institutions, a key factor in overcoming social dialogue issues with both waste producers and collectors, and essential for coordinating the efficiency of the waste management process, informing and engaging the public.
The toolkit supports the achievement of these objectives through three complementary levers:
- Highlighting the socio-economic and environmental benefits resulting from improvements in collection and recycling systems (calculator tool);
- Increasing information and bridging the gap between stakeholders and the resources available in the area (mapping tool);
- Seeking win-win benefits for all stakeholders involved in the issue (facilitator tool).
Toolkit for people:
Actions
- Training and awareness-raising
ACRA trains teachers, school staff and third-year secondary school students in Elinkine on both the theoretical objectives (key concepts of the circular economy, the importance of recycling) and the practical aspects of the project (conducting interviews and completing questionnaires) through two cycles of training modules, each lasting four hours. - Participatory mapping of the waste and resource cycle
EStà designs the mapping questionnaire to investigate waste management in Elinkine. ACRA distributes it to the students, providing tablets to assist with completion, so that they can gather the required information by asking questions within their social networks. - Calculation of socio-economic-environmental impacts
EStà works on refining integrated data analysis technologies to develop survey tools for data observation. It then collects the digital questionnaires, analyses the data, calculates possible scenarios and develops the matrix. Finally, using a specifically developed calculation tool, it provides an overview of the socio-economic and environmental impacts of the circular economy in the region. - Facilitation
ACRA runs a Living Lab, a facilitation technique (specifically adapted by EStà to the project context), to establish a relationship between NGOs, the project’s direct beneficiaries, and local authorities (members of the Municipal Council, village chiefs, traditional authorities, fisheries inspectors, etc.). On this occasion, ACRA moderates the discussion among project stakeholders, whilst EStà introduces the themes of the circular economy, presents the tools adopted and the results of the work carried out in collaboration with the young mappers. Finally, ACRA, together with EStà, facilitates the discussion between the direct and indirect beneficiaries of the project to open a dialogue on the possible evolution of the waste management system at a local level.
