In brief
Mountaining waste from tourism, Chako Zanzibar repurposes discarded glass into functional goods while training local women, creating jobs, and improving families’ socioeconomic status. Mwanamkuu Mussa, a mother of four, says the initiative has made her an independent woman and enabled her to pay for her children’s education and health. The project, founded by Dutch entrepreneur Anneloes Roelandschap, has diverted millions of bottles from landfills and trained more than 400 community members.
In Zanzibar’s Stone Town, amid the bustle of tourist hotels and the clatter of daily life, 52‑year‑old Mwanamkuu Mussa can see beauty in what others consider waste. Behind the glass bottles that line the workshop door are school fees paid, medical bills covered, and a dream of a home for her four children. She began turning discarded glass into income and opportunity when she joined the social enterprise Chako Zanzibar in 2021.
Before her work with Chako, Mussa was a nursery school teacher, a modest job that left little room for savings or future planning. In 2021 she left that role to learn how to clean, cut, and shape glass into drinking glasses, vases, lamps, and decorative pieces. Her responsibilities now stretch from collecting bottles from hotels and resorts to training new artisans and keeping the workshop orderly. The products that emerge from this process find their way back into the tourism supply chain—tourists purchase them as souvenirs, granting the enterprise a steady market and a chance to promote sustainable practices.
The enterprise itself traces its roots to 2012, when Dutch entrepreneur Anneloes Roelandschap and her partner detected a problem while running a hotel they opened in Stone Town in 2008. They noticed how tourism generated jobs but also produced waste that the island struggled to manage and saw that the benefits of tourism were unevenly distributed. Chako Zanzibar was therefore created to collect waste—glass bottles and plastic—from hospitality businesses, process it, and convert it into marketable goods. According to Roelandschap, the organization has diverted more than five million bottles from landfills and trained over 400 local people so far.
Women comprise a significant share of Chako’s workforce, and the enterprise places a strong emphasis on female empowerment. Mussa says, and many of her fellow workers echo, that the skills they acquire and the income they generate give them the ability to make decisions about their families’ futures.
Working at Chako has helped me become an independent woman.
—Mwanamkuu Mussa
The financial boost from the bottle‑upcycling venture has tangible effects on Mussa’s household. She now supports her children’s schooling, covers medical expenses, and runs a small DVD library that serves the community. “The income has enabled me to open my own DVD library and contribute to my children’s education and healthcare,” she explains. Mussa’s long‑term goal is to build a house for her family, a step that has now moved from hope to realistic possibility thanks to Chako’s support.
Chako’s strategy represents a model of public accountability within Zanzibar’s thriving tourism sector. By redirecting waste toward productive uses, the enterprise links environmental stewardship to economic development. It also illustrates how institutions—such as hotels and resorts—can partner with grassroots ventures to mitigate their ecological footprint while fostering local capacity. Government agencies and civil society could take note of this partnership model as a way to meet environmental targets and expand community livelihoods without heavy external investment.
The case of Mwanamkuu Mussa and her colleagues underscores the civic stakes of sustainable tourism in Zanzibar. The success of Chako demonstrates that waste from an industry that feeds the nation’s economy can be repurposed into goods that empower the very people whose livelihoods might otherwise remain vulnerable. By training women, generating income, and preventing millions of bottles from ending up in landfills, Chako is, in a sense, reshaping the island’s future—one bottle at a time.