For decades, Pomona has been shorthand in Harare for everything wrong with the city's rubbish problem: an unlined 1984-era dump that outgrew its design capacity, caught fire repeatedly, and became, in the words of one academic review, "a potentially hazardous and toxic dump." Now it is at the centre of a very different story, one where the same site becomes a source of electricity rather than disease.
According to Zimbabwean waste-management platform KleenGo, a €304 million deal is transforming Pomona into a waste-to-energy plant under the Geo Pomona partnership. The pitch is straightforward: instead of letting rubbish rot and burn in the open, releasing methane and toxic smoke, the facility converts it into power. KleenGo cites research showing that leaving 3,000 tonnes of waste in dumpsites generates 1,763 kilotonnes of CO2 a year, a figure a functioning waste-to-energy plant could cut by an estimated 41 percent.
The scale of the original problem is well documented. A 2021 situational analysis by the Green Business Gazette found that around 90 percent of Harare's collected waste was being dumped at Pomona and Golden Quarry, sites the Environmental Management Act had actually ordered closed by the end of 2012. Neither ever closed. Academic reviews published in the Biosciences Biotechnology Research Asia journal describe Pomona as unlined and uncompacted in its early operation, meaning rainfall carried leachate, including, at times, human waste, straight into groundwater that residents relied on for wells and boreholes during the city's frequent water shortages.
That contamination has a documented public health cost. The same review notes that Harare recorded 19,517 cholera cases in 2009 alone, a crisis the World Health Organization linked to unsanitary conditions around the city's dumps and sewage system. Fires became a recurring hazard on top of that: Herald reporting and the Green Business Gazette both record blazes at Pomona in 2016, 2018 and again in August 2020, the last of which pushed smog over the Standards Association of Zimbabwe's and the WHO's air pollution thresholds.
The turnaround now underway has drawn international attention. Kenyan outlet Streamlinefeed reported that UN Resident Coordinator to Zimbabwe Dr Rosemary Kalapurakal visited the site and endorsed Geo Pomona's work, describing the shift from "toxic underground fires, severe groundwater contamination and unregulated methane" to a "cutting-edge waste-to-energy facility" as a continental benchmark. Herald Online's February 2026 coverage frames the partnership as direct relief for a city whose director of health, Dr Prosper Chonzi, has blamed chronic underinvestment, and a fleet of only 33 functioning trucks against an estimated need of 120, for the persistence of cholera and typhoid outbreaks.
Why it matters beyond Pomona itself
If the plant delivers on its promise, the implications reach past the immediate neighbourhood. Environmentalists quoted by KleenGo argue that converting waste into a saleable commodity, electricity, rather than an expensive liability creates jobs in collection and recycling while removing the fire and vermin risks that have made Pomona a public health flashpoint for years. It would also mark a rare case of a Southern African capital solving a legacy landfill problem through infrastructure investment rather than simply relocating the dump. The test now is operational: whether the facility can process Harare's roughly 850 to 1,000 tonnes of daily waste at the volumes needed to actually retire open dumping, given the city has historically managed to collect only about half of what it generates.
Sources
- €304m deal to transform Pomona waste management, KleenGo
- UN commends Geo Pomona's waste-to-energy transformation at Zimbabwe dumpsite, Streamlinefeed
- Solid waste: A persistent challenge for Harare . . . Geo Pomona partnership brings relief, Herald Online
- Harare Waste Management - Situational Analysis, Green Business Gazette
- Landfills: Problems, Solutions and Decision-Making of Waste Disposal in Harare (Zimbabwe), Biosciences Biotechnology Research Asia
Written by Rufaro
Plain-language guides to getting rid of anything in Zimbabwe, properly.
