When the Water Lily students contacted the Veolia Environnement Foundation, I met with them to evaluate their motivation and the soundness of their project -I have experience in wastemanagement, recruitment issues and Madagascar,having spent two years there during my military service.I found their project well put together : it was financially sound and their analysis of the social aspects was satisfactory.
When you want to reorganize waste collection in a developing country, youhave to take account of all the families who eke out a -miserable - living from what they can scavenge from dumps. You can't deprive them of their sole source of income.
Veolia Environmental Services manages the entire waste collection system in Alexandria in Egypt and so we have experience in this field. We sent two project leaders there to study our organization.
In June 2006, when their mission is completed, I will spend a week with them in Madagascar during my holidays to find out what they have done: it's interesting to see what young people, with their new way of looking at things, can come up with inconnection with an issue that we don't know much about in developing countries, where it's impossible to export our model of industrialized waste management.
Jean-Pierre Leteneur
Head of recruitment and mobility at Veolia Environmental Services, sponsors the "Water Lily" non profit organization, which is installing a waste management project in Antananarivo.
Jean-Pierre Leteneur
