The development establishment has finally discovered circularity—but not for the reasons it claims. African Union officials gathered in Addis Ababa in October with the usual rhetoric: sustainability, climate action, resource preservation. Scratch beneath the Continental Circular Economy Action Plan and a more prosaic truth emerges. African governments aren’t embracing circularity to save the planet. They’re doing it because linear economic models have become ruinously expensive.
Extracting, importing, manufacturing, then discarding materials—the conventional development playbook—requires bottomless credit lines and reliable access to global supply chains. Many African nations have neither. Keeping materials circulating domestically turns out to be less environmental virtue than economic necessity.
Which makes the research focus deliciously backwards. 84 per cent of circular economy research fixates on wealthy countries. Meanwhile 73 per cent of workers in low-income countries already toil in the informal economy—repairing, refurbishing, recycling. The Global South doesn’t need lectures about transitioning to circular practices. It needs capital and regulation to monetise the circular economy it’s been running for decades.
The accidental innovators
Wealthy nations innovate sustainable models, developing countries eventually adopt them. That’s the standard script. Reality runs backwards. When the International Labour Organisation estimated seven-eight million new jobs in circular sectors, it buried a crucial detail—most circular economic activity already happens where formal jobs are scarcest. Lagos street markets teeming with electronics refurbishers aren’t awaiting Western validation. They’re pioneers who’ve been at it for years.
Development agencies calling for ‘circular economy strategies’ are mostly recognising existing practices. Extended producer responsibility schemes? African cities have operated informal e-waste recovery networks for decades, albeit with dreadful working conditions and minimal environmental safeguards. The policy challenge isn’t introducing circularity. It’s upgrading the circularity that poverty imposed.
This reframing matters because it shifts circular economy from environmental agenda to industrial policy. When UNDP joined the African Circular Economy Alliance as a strategic partner in June 2025, the development agency framed it as climate action. But read the African Development Bank’s analysis more carefully: circular models reduce dependency on volatile commodity imports, capture multiple revenue cycles from single material inputs, and create employment precisely where labour markets are most desperate.
Development goals, circular means
Here’s where circular economy stops being a niche environmental concern and becomes central to achieving SDG 12—responsible consumption and production—and by extension, most other development objectives. The uncomfortable truth: sustainable consumption matters far less to development outcomes than sustainable production. And the latter is impossible when economies remain tethered to extractive supply chains they cannot control.
Developing nations face a troubling calculus: rising material consumption as populations urbanise, coupled with diminishing access to affordable raw materials as wealthy countries hoard resources for their own ‘green transitions.’ Circular models—designing products for longevity, establishing domestic remanufacturing capacity, recovering materials from waste streams—aren’t environmental luxuries. They’re competitive necessities.
The job creation angle is more prosaic but equally compelling. Repair, refurbishment, and recycling are labour-intensive activities that cannot be easily automated or offshored. A smartphone assembly line in Shenzhen employs fewer workers than a thriving repair ecosystem across African capitals. The former requires massive capital investment and integration into global supply chains. The latter requires regulatory frameworks that legitimise informal sector activities.
Yet only 22 per cent of global e-waste is collected and managed sustainably. The rest either rots in landfills or gets ‘managed’ in informal sectors with predictably terrible outcomes for workers and environments. The circular economy opportunity isn’t creating something new—it’s formalising something that already happens, badly.
Policy implications
This reframing demands different policy interventions than conventional sustainability programmes. Forget exhortations about recycling bins and consumer awareness. Serious circular economy strategies for development contexts require unsexy institutional reforms: extended producer responsibility regulations that force manufacturers to design for disassembly, fiscal instruments that make secondary materials competitive with virgin inputs, trade policies that don’t penalise recovered materials, and labour standards that transform dangerous informal work into decent employment.
The African Development Bank’s integration of circularity into its Ten-Year Strategy recognises this shift. The Bank’s ‘Four Cardinal Points’ agenda—expanding access to capital, reforming financial systems, harnessing demographic potential, and investing in resilient infrastructure—becomes more coherent when viewed through a circular lens. Demographic dividends mean nothing if young workers have no materials to work with. Infrastructure investments are squandered if they simply accelerate linear consumption. Financial systems must price environmental externalities or they misprice everything.
But the strategy faces genuine contradictions. Circular economy sounds appealingly self-contained—closed loops, local materials, domestic value chains. Yet every attempt at implementation reveals how thoroughly globalised production has become. Electronics refurbishment requires replacement components manufactured elsewhere. Textile recycling needs chemical inputs from global suppliers. Even “urban mining” of valuable metals from e-waste feeds into international commodity markets.
Inconvenient arithmetic
The most serious blind spot is labour quality. Yes, circular economy could generate millions of jobs. But jobs doing what, paid how much, under what conditions? Visit an informal recycling facility in Mumbai or Manila and the circular economy reveals its darker circularity: valuable materials recovered through labour that is dangerous, poorly paid, and often performed by society’s most marginalised. Research has found that harsh working conditions in circular sectors are concentrated in the Global South, where regulation is weakest.
The uncomfortable question: is formalising these circular activities enough, or does legitimate circular economy require wholesale transformation of how these jobs are structured, compensated, and protected? The latter is obviously preferable but ruinously expensive for governments already struggling to provide basic services.
There’s also the scale problem. Circularity works beautifully at city or regional level. Scaling nationally requires coordination that defeats most governments. Scaling internationally requires trade agreements that don’t yet exist. Meanwhile, the global economy operates at just 8.6 per cent circularity—the rest remains stubbornly linear.
A pivot, not a panacea
A circular economy won’t save development policy from its contradictions. It won’t magic away resource constraints or eliminate poverty. It certainly won’t compensate for structural reforms that governments refuse to implement. But it does offer something valuable: a framework for development that acknowledges material limits whilst creating genuine economic opportunities.
The key is abandoning the notion that circular economy is environmental policy that happens to have development benefits. The causality runs the other direction. For many developing nations, circular models offer the only plausible path to industrial development that doesn’t require endless expansion of material throughput. This makes circularity an economic strategy that happens to benefit the environment—a far more durable political basis than environmental virtue.
If the development establishment manages to internalise this logic—that circular economy is about economic resilience, not recycling bins—then the African Union’s Continental Action Plan might achieve something beyond the usual strategy document fate. Smaller projects in urban waste management or rural reuse networks matter, certainly. But genuine transformation requires aligning finance, industrial policy, trade regulations, and labour standards around circular principles.
The agenda remains tentative, the contradictions unresolved, the financing inadequate. But for nations where linear growth models have become unsustainable in the most literal sense, circular economy has shifted from environmental aspiration to economic imperative. That’s not a modest pivot. It’s a fundamental rewrite of how development works—one that’s already happening, whether development agencies notice or not.
Photo: Dreamstime.
