Chad has taken a decisive step toward reshaping its development path by adopting its first National Circular Economy Roadmap (2025–2035). Backed by the African Development Bank’s Africa Circular Economy Facility (ACEF), the plan seeks to transform the way the country produces, consumes, and manages resources. It moves beyond recycling as a stand-alone activity and positions circularity as a strategic lever for green growth, job creation, and resilience.
Rooted in the “Vision 2030, The Chad We Want” framework, the roadmap builds on practices long embedded in Chadian life. In N’Djamena, informal waste collectors have for years combed through neighborhoods asking, “Do you have any bottles?” They would salvage, reuse, and resell what they could find, driven by necessity rather than policy. Now, that informal system is being scaled up, formalised, and embedded in national strategy, with governance structures, financing mechanisms, and measurable targets.
By 2035, Chad aims to reduce non-recycled waste by 40 percent, create more than 25,000 green jobs, and raise access to electricity toward the African median, largely through biomass and organic waste recovery. Six key sectors form the backbone of the roadmap are; agri-food, waste, plastics, construction, water, and energy—each linked to specific interventions. These range from “circular farms” modeled on Benin’s Songhai Center, which integrate agriculture, energy, and water in closed-loop systems, to youth-led plastic recycling businesses that turn waste into construction materials.
This shift is not simply about environmental stewardship; it addresses some of Chad’s most pressing development challenges. Access to electricity remains among the lowest in the world, with fewer than 12 percent of citizens connected to power. Food insecurity affects more than 3.7 million people, while post-harvest losses exceed 200,000 tons annually. The roadmap proposes tangible, interlinked solutions—turning crop residues into compost, generating biogas from animal waste, and treating wastewater for irrigation—to strengthen food systems, diversify energy sources, and reduce pressure on natural resources.
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The adoption of the roadmap is part of a wider African movement toward circularity, supported by ACEF and the African Circular Economy Alliance (ACEA). Similar national plans are underway in Benin, Cameroon, and Ethiopia, each adapted to local realities but sharing a common goal: to make circularity a driver of inclusive, low-carbon growth across the continent.
Rolling out the plan will require more than good intentions. The government has convened national workshops and set up a specialised technical committee to coordinate implementation, working alongside public, private, and civil society partners. The timing coincides with a broader national investment drive and a new IMF-supported reform program, opening the door to align major infrastructure and industrial spending with circular principles—whether through the use of low-carbon building materials, integration of waste-to-energy facilities, or adoption of sustainable construction standards.
Chad’s embrace of circularity is an attempt to turn its vulnerabilities into levers for transformation. By using scarcity as a catalyst for innovation, the country is positioning itself not only to manage waste more effectively but also to create livelihoods, strengthen sovereignty, and build resilience in the face of climate and economic shocks. In a region often defined by its constraints, the roadmap offers a vision of development that makes those constraints part of the solution.
