A collection system built around the gap, not around the trucks.

iTRUSH began as a question rather than a product: why does a city that clearly wants its waste collected still leave so much of it uncollected?

The answer, repeatedly, was not that Kampala lacks collectors. It has plenty — registered companies with trucks, and hundreds of informal operators with tricycles and handcarts. What it lacks is any shared system connecting them to the households that need them. Every collection is negotiated privately, priced on the spot, and recorded nowhere.

The consequences follow directly. A resident cannot plan around a service whose arrival is unpredictable and whose price changes with the weather. A collector cannot build a viable route from customers who find them by word of mouth. A municipality cannot regulate a stream of waste it cannot measure. And because nobody records where waste actually goes, dumping it in a wetland costs an operator exactly nothing.

What this platform is

iTRUSH is the connective layer. Residents request a collection and see the price before they commit. Licensed companies receive matched, paid work near their existing routes. Money moves through the platform and is settled on a published cycle. Every collection ends with a record of which licensed facility received the waste.

None of those pieces is novel in isolation. What makes the system worth building is that all four have to exist together: pricing without dispatch is a directory, dispatch without payment leaves collectors chasing cash, and payment without proof of disposal simply makes illegal dumping more efficient.

Deliberate design decisions

Several choices in this platform cost more to build than the obvious alternative, and were made anyway:

• Cash on collection is supported. A meaningful share of Kampala households do not hold a mobile-money balance. A platform that only serves people who do would cede exactly the streets that most need serving. Cash collections still pass through the ledger and reconcile at payout.
• Personal data is encrypted at rest. Names, phone numbers, e-mail addresses and physical addresses are stored as ciphertext, searchable only through irreversible keyed indexes. It complicates every query. It also means a stolen database dump yields points on a map rather than doorsteps with names attached.
• The audit trail is tamper-evident. Each entry carries a hash of the one before it, so removing or editing history breaks a chain the administrator console can verify on demand. An audit log that an administrator can quietly edit is not evidence.
• Money is tracked with double-entry bookkeeping. The platform holds residents' funds before passing them on. A single running balance would drift silently; a ledger either balances or does not, and the finance screen says which.
• Releasing a payout takes two people. Whoever approves a settlement cannot be the one who releases it. It is friction, on purpose: one compromised administrator account should not be able to move money out.

What it does not claim

This platform does not solve waste management in Kampala. It does not build landfills, run recycling plants, or change what people throw away. It addresses one specific failure — the absence of a reliable, priced, accountable link between households and licensed collectors — and tries to make the data that falls out of solving it useful to everyone else working on the wider problem.

The figures on the impact page are live platform numbers, not projections. Where they are small, the page shows them small.