have white elephants all over the continent

[GoodTaste]

Does "white elephant" refer to "plants falling into neglect or becoming too expensive to maintain"?


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[FONT=Georgia, serif] [/FONT]Financing isn't the only reason that waste-to-resource initiatives fall short, warns Furlong. Many promising projects have met with resistance because they failed to address cultural elements, which can affect buy-in, whether from toilet users or national politicians. That could be something as visceral as negative attitudes to human waste, or an unwillingness to use new toilet technologies designed to capture waste in usable form. Muspratt and others instead deal with sludge as it is found in pits and latrines that already exist, to prevent their plants falling into neglect or becoming too expensive to maintain. “The driving force for me was trying to figure a way to not have white elephants all over the continent of Africa.”

Source

 

[J&K Tutoring]

Not directly. Something may fall into neglect or be considered too expensive to maintain for reasons other than it being considered a white elephant.

White elephant is quite a common term. Did you look in your dictionary? Here's a link: http://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/white-elephant