Industrialisation has powered development – potentially lifting millions out of poverty, creating employment, and driving growth. But today, the environmental costs of unchecked and often poorly planned industrial expansion can no longer be dismissed as tomorrow’s problem. Pollution knows no borders and its impacts on human and environmental health, including on productive systems like agriculture, are immediate, cumulative, and increasingly global. For economies in the Global South, where growth is accelerating under tighter sustainability requirements (e.g., mandatory due diligence, ESG-linked trade finance and reporting, industry-led sustainability standards) environmental hazards and social risks have become barriers to competitiveness and resilience.
The UK FCDO-UNCTAD Sustainable Manufacturing and Environmental Pollution (SMEP) Programme is tackling this narrative head-on.
Time’s up for wasteful growth
The World Water Day on 22 March and International Day of Zero Waste on 30 March this year, created momentum for reflection on evidence arising from SMEP Programme’s activities in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia: Pollution is neither an unavoidable cost of progress nor simply an environmental concern. Rather, it’s fundamentally an economic inefficiency: wasteful, costly, and an increasing barrier to competitiveness in international trade.
Kenya, a country where 62% of solid waste is dumped into the environment, offers a glimpse of what SMEP is building towards: Actionable, effective and replicable models where pollution avoidance and responsible use of resources in manufacturing contribute to both environmental gains and market development.
Around the country, SMEP-supported enterprises are converting waste streams from both rural and urban sources into commercial opportunity. These streams, had the interventions not occurred, would contribute to CO2 and methane emissions, and in some cases leakage of organic discharges into waterways, causing oxygen depletion and freshwater eutrophication. Organic waste, the country’s largest waste stream, is being valorised: Mananasi Fibre is intercepting biomass waste (pineapple plant residues) and turning it into textile-grade fibres and compost, TakaTaka Solutions and Chanzi are re-routing municipal and rural organic waste towards producing organic compost, biochar and insect protein from black soldier flies, Sanergy is turning agricultural waste as feedstocks into biochar for regenerative farming practices, and Kenya Private Sector Alliance (KEPSA) is trialling the use of fish waste as a feedstock for a biogas-to-energy plant and promoting decentralised biogas solutions in Kenya’s coastal communities. In Nairobi, the Kenya National Cleaner Production Centre (KNCPC) and Mr. Green are testing wastewater treatment and recovery solutions tailored to specific industrial sites. The focus is on sectors known for high water pollution risks (e.g., large-scale recycling facilities, veterinary and pharmaceutical manufacturers, and tanneries). These industries often discharge untreated/undertreated industrial effluent into sewers and into the environment around the Nairobi Rivers Basin.
These are not isolated pilots. Supported by policy engagement on the ground, they are field-tested models for scaling sustainable consumption and production (SDG 12) in developing countries that demonstrate what circular industrial transformation can look like when innovation, regulation, and market logic converge.
Redefining growth for a resource-constrained world
What SMEP aims to achieve over the next critical 18 months of its lifetime extends far beyond impressive pilot projects. With a critical mass of innovations being tested and evidence-based policy recommendations now in hand, the focus is shifting from experimentation to consolidation and embedding results into real systems through regulatory adoption, procurement frameworks, and replicable models aligned with sustainability and trade objectives. Across themes like water, regenerative agriculture, gender equality and social inclusion (GESI), and pollution-related health risks, SMEP is now positioned to deliver not only demonstration-ready results with impact potential, but also institutional traction. If it succeeds, SMEP may not only deliver a strong project portfolio, it could also demonstrate how pollution solutions in the Global South can be drivers for sustainable development.
As international markets increasingly demand sustainability safeguards from exporters, developing nations risk marginalisation if they cannot keep pace. SMEP offers a timely response: Evidence-based solutions that enable industries in developing economies to adopt cleaner production technologies, integrate circular economy principles, and cost-effectively comply with international standards and regulations. As a compelling proposition for policymakers and businesses alike, SMEP is reframing environmental stewardship as a pathway to competitive advantage, not just a burdensome compliance exercise.
Translating impact: Communicating SMEP as a bridge to policy uptake
In development, visibility is often mistaken for influence. But visibility alone rarely drives structural change. What ultimately matters is whether insights from the ground can catalyse systemic change from regulators to policymakers. For SMEP, communicating results can be a tool for policy transmission when it prioritises transparency, credibility and accountability over visibility alone. Its thematic briefs distil lessons from pilot interventions into formats designed for policy use, whilst its engagement with journalists ensures those same insights enter public discourse with clarity and urgency. Informed reporting and policy-ready research are twin levers in SMEP’s strategy to make sustainability visible and actionable.
In regions where enforcement is uneven, journalists do more than inform – they expose, scrutinise, and shift incentives. In Zanzibar, SMEP collaborated with Africa 21 to strengthen the conditions under which environmental policies on sustainability and circularity can take root, training African journalists from the Indian Ocean region on the blue and circular economy, with a focus on boosting awareness of SDG 14 on life below water.
At the workshop, SMEP disseminated knowledge and good practices on global and regional policy processes shaping the sustainability landscape. Topics included the UN global plastics treaty negotiations, East Africa’s regional response to marine pollution and single-use plastics (SUP), insights from the 5th United Nations Ocean Forum, textile waste and recycling management, and emerging trade (food and non-food) opportunities in the seaweed sector. These exchanges equipped journalists with the policy context and technical grounding needed to report on circular economy shifts with authority.
Preventing waste from all sources to protect our ocean (SDG 14.1)
At the global level, SMEP is shaping the marine pollution agenda in a milestone year: 2025 marks the deadline for SDG 14.1 – the global commitment to prevent and significantly reduce marine pollution from land-based sources. Through its substantive engagement in the recently concluded 5th United Nations Ocean Forum (UNOF5) and by curating the first-ever Marine-based Products and Services (MAPS) Expo in Geneva, SMEP helped reframe the global conversation around marine pollution, where safe and effective plastic substitutes and alternatives from around the world, previously seen as peripheral, are now cited as evidence that scalable and non-plastic substitutes and alternatives work. The Chairs’ Summary of the 5th Ocean Forum[1] explicitly recognises the trade potential of marine-based and natural non-plastic substitutes, underscoring their relevance to global ocean sustainability and ocean economy agendas.
This reinforces SMEP’s ongoing contributions and advocacy within the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee[2] process to develop an international legally binding instrument (ILBI) on plastic pollution, including in the marine environment – helping shift global norms towards legally binding commitments that reflect the realities and capabilities of developing countries.
A new centre of gravity
As geopolitical landscapes shift, environmental regulations tighten and trade rules evolve, SMEP beneficiary countries in the Global South are not only in ‘response mode’ – they are setting precedents. SMEP’s sprint to the end will be about locking in this shift. The models are in place. The evidence exists. The stakeholders are engaged. What remains is turning these into policy, procurement, and institutional practice so they endure beyond the lifespan of the programme.
In the end, this is not a story of catch-up growth. The SMEP story is a redefinition of how industrialisation happens in the 21st century: resource-efficient, cleaner, and locally led. If the Global South can institutionalise circularity at pilot scale, it will not just participate in the next era of sustainable development – it will author it.
[1] The UN Ocean Forum is aimed at preparing for and supporting the United Nations Ocean Conference in the implementation of Sustainable Development Goal 14 – this year’s iteration to be in Nice, France from 9 to 13 June 2025. The Forum, held since 2017, has been providing cohesive inputs and recommendations to each UN Ocean Conference bridging the economic, trade and development communities across Geneva, Nairobi and Rome.
[2] The second part of the fifth session (INC-5.2) will be in Geneva, Switzerland on 5-14 August 2025.
[3] Ghost gear refers to abandoned, lost, or otherwise discarded fishing gear (ALDFG) e.g., nets, lines, and traps, that continues to drift at sea, entangling marine life and degrading ecosystems. It is a major source of marine debris and contributes significantly to fish stocks depletion (including potential risks to endangered species) and ocean plastic pollution (FAO, n.d.).
Maria Durleva
UNCTAD-SMEP Programme Management Officer
With inputs from Henrique Pacini (UNCTAD), Glen Wilson (UNCTAD), Lorenzo Formenti (UNCTAD) and Amanda Dinan (SMEP PMA).
