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National Cleaning Days: Beyond Sanitation to Collective Responsibility and Vision
National Cleaning Days can go beyond sanitation to promote circularity, civic responsibility and more clean, organised and livable communities.
Saturday 25 July 2026 marked the first National Cleaning Days exercise in Uganda. The announcement that caught most unsuspecting Ugandans off guard would see a strict, security-led, community-based cleaning exercise running from 7–10 AM countrywide. Those that dared move within the designated hours were either handed a broom or shovel. This will become routine for the last Saturday of each month. Communities will collectively clean public and social spaces including roads, drainage channels, markets, schools, health facilities, etc. The immediate objective is simple: improved sanitation in our communities. The bigger question is, beyond cleaning, can we make our communities circular and more livable?
Behind National Cleaning Days is an idea that cleanliness and sanitation should be treated as a shared civic responsibility rather than something left to urban and local authorities. How then do we stretch this civic responsibility from a routine cleaning exercise to a collective culture of sustainability and recreating the communities we aspire to live in? In the aftermath of the first National Cleaning Day exercise, parts of Kampala were left with piles of uncollected waste from a well-intentioned, limitedly coordinated exercise. KCCA warned that waste could enter drainage channels as the rains increase, contributing to blocked waterways, flooding and public health risks. The concern was on sustainable solid waste management practices beyond scheduled community clean-ups.
National Cleaning Days should therefore be used to launch a culture of circularity. Communities need to embrace the reduce, reuse and recycle practices to keep the value going and reduce unnecessary domestic waste. Most of our households still have a use-and-dump culture, no waste segregation at source and hardly any secondary use of waste. Food and other organic waste can support composting. Plastics, metals, paper and glass can be separated and recycled. Construction sites can also reduce the amount of material that ends up as community waste. Civic enlightenment at community level can impact household behavior on waste management; effectively addressing the problem from the grassroots and potentially reducing the amount of domestic waste through circular practices. The Cleaning Days initiative should therefore be used as a platform for civic engagement and sensitizations towards circularity at communal and household level.
National Cleaning Days also accord us a critical reflection of our communities from a livability perspective. Globally, cities are ranked for their livability, with scoring criteria tagged to considerations such as air quality, public infrastructure and accessibility, health care quality and access, etc. Kampala and other local cities have lost most of their natural spaces. Former green belts are no more. Towers and malls occupy former urban wetlands and floodplains, once-natural carbon sinks and stormwater buffers. In most communities, drainage reserves, road verges and green areas have been treated as spare land or put to economic use, without regard to their primary purpose. In the right setting, such spaces are natural sinks for stormwater, provide shade, host community and public parks, making neighborhoods more livable.
As we build a culture of clean communities, we should equally foster a culture of communal responsibility for public spaces. National Cleaning Days can incorporate activities aimed at reimagining and creating sustainable communities. Initiatives such as restoration of green belts where possible and tree planting provide net environmental, health and welfare benefits for communities.
Clean and organised communities also enhance social and economic value of localities. In real estate, the quality of the surrounding community matters. A new residential block may have good finishes, security and parking, but its market value and uptake are affected if the access road floods, the neighborhood sewer is blocked or waste accumulates outside the development. Clean communities therefore support property values, business activity and long-term development.
National Cleaning Days should therefore not become a routine sanitation exercise. The initiative carries potential for strategic and systematic civic capacitation for circular and livable communities. Cleaning initiatives must sit alongside behavioral shifts on waste management, coupled with a common vision to build better communities.
The best measure of success will not be how many tons of waste will have been collected each last Saturday of the month but whether there is less to collect subsequently as communities transform into clean, organised and more livable spaces.
