Samuel Malinga serves as a Founder and Managing Director of Sanitation Africa. Having grown up in the Naguru slum, Samuel became determined to increase access to sanitation services in remote and inaccessible communities throughout the country.
At the age of 12, Samuel moved to the Naguru slums in the Ugandan capital of Kampala, where he experienced first-hand the systemic problem of poor sanitation and waste management. “It’s so painful to me that children die of preventable diseases brought about by simple sanitation issues that we know how to resolve.” In Uganda, over 95% of the population uses latrines and septic tanks, and 60% of these pits are consistently full in Kampala. Coupled with rapid population growth, the majority of the population resides in unplanned settlements, which are congested and lack proper sanitation. This is why Samuel decided to start Sanitation Africa, through which he developed a full-cycle sanitation system that starts with the building of local low-cost but highly hygienic toilets and ends with the conversion of sludge into cooking briquettes and agriculture manure.
Samuel established Sanitation Africa in 2015 with the mission to enable low-income households’ access decent and affordable toilets. Sanitation Africa designs innovative toilet solutions, improves and upgrades existing ones, to create a sustainable and dignified sanitation solutions. The Sani-enterprise provides emptying services to areas that are otherwise hard to reach. In addition to this, we process cooking briquettes made from dried sludge cake, which are sold as an environmentally friendly option to firewood. Sanitation Africa has constructed over 680 toilets, reaching more than 2,000 households in remote and inaccessible communities throughout Uganda.
In recognition of his works and services, Samuel has earned several awards both nationally and internationally, such as being selected as one of eight social entrepreneurs by the Social Entrepreneurship Forum in Sweden, Yunus and Youth Fellow 2017, First runner up of Civil Society WASH Innovations award 2016 in Brisbane, Australia, Winner of Total StartUpper, Winner of Tony O. Elumelu Prize in Business and one of twelve engineers short-listed for Africa Prize for Engineering Innovation. In 2016, Samuel was listed as one of the 30 under 30 African Entrepreneurs by Forbes.
