Career: Meet the Wecyclers (CNN African Start-Up)

Every week, African Start-Up follows entrepreneurs in various countries across the continent to see how they are working to make their business dreams become reality.

It's a bright May morning and the purple-shirted army of tricycle drivers is on the streets of Lagos once again. Eyes trained ahead, they zip past traffic on their specially-modified vehicles, dipping in and out of the Nigerian megacity's slums.

This is the mobile division of Wecyclers, an innovative enterprise using an incentive-based program to help solve Lagos's acute waste management problem.

Every week, the company's cyclists peddle from door to door in low-income neighborhoods to pick up recyclable trash from registered households. Items like plastic bottles, aluminum cans and plastic sachets are all weighed and logged on site, and from there are taken to a specific sorting area where they're bagged in order to be sold to recycling factories.

In return, participating households receive points via SMS. These can eventually be exchanged for rewards, mainly donated items ranging from bowls and blenders to food products and mobile phone air time.
"Every three months they have opportunity to redeem the points for something," says Weclycers chief executive Bilikiss Adebiyi-Abiola. "So we give them really small gifts that just motivate them and encourage them to recycle."

Lagos, a sprawling megacity of more than 18 million people, generates a massive 10,000 metric tons of waste daily, according to the city's waste management authority. Only 40% of it is believed to be formally collected, leaving large quantities of rubbish blocking gutters and piling up on streets and outside houses -- a major health and environmental hazard.

Wecyclers is a Lagos-based startup using an incentive-based program to deal with the waste problem in Lagos, the Nigerian megacity where more than 18 million people live.

"Low income communities are the ones that are more affected," says Adebiyi-Abiola. "(People) end up living in their waste, so we basically saw that there was a really big need to provide collection services for people that are living in the low-income areas."

Born and bred in Lagos, Adebiyi-Abiola went to the United States at the age of 17. There, she trained and worked as a computer scientist, before enrolling to MIT for a masters in business administration. It was during that time, while working on a study project focused on the problems faced by people in low-income areas, when she came up with the idea to launch a company offering waste collection and recycling services in her hometown.

In order to encourage people to sort rubbish, the company gives them points which they can redeem for items like blenders, irons or soaps every three months.

"I really love Lagos and I wanted to do something that would give back to it," says Adebiyi-Abiola. "For me, the environment is really where it all starts," she adds. "When you have a clean environment then you have health, when you have health then you can start thinking about money, jobs and things like that."

At the moment, most rewards come from donations as the company is yet to turn a profit: "We hope that as we grow and add value to the material we sell then we hope to see profits come in - but now, we are not making profits," says Adebiyi-Abiola.

Set up just a year and a half ago, Wecyclers has grown today to have some 5,000 households subscribed to its service. The startup has so far collected nearly 300 tons of waste, using a fleet of 16 low-cost cargo bicycles that are creatively designed to transport large cloth sacks of trash.

In regards to recycling as a business, however, there are still many challenges faced by Wecyclers, which is yet to make a profit.
"We hope that as we grow and add value to the material we sell, then we hope to see profits come in," says Adebiyi-Abiola, who employs 31 people.

Abiola says that her incentive for starting the company has been a desire to improve the living conditions of people in low-income areas.

Despite the problems, the entrepreneur has big plans for the future. She says she's determined to keep on working to expand the service across Lagos and beyond and ultimately help to change people's attitudes toward waste.

Wecyclers currently employs 31 people, but Abiola is dreaming big: "In 10 years I want Wecyclers to be the biggest recycling company in Nigeria," she says.

"I want to show the whole world that this is something that can succeed," says Adebiyi-Abiola. "That we can create a low-cost way of solving the Nigerian problems, the Lagos problems, here, with Lagos solutions," she adds.

The entrepreneur was the laureate of the Cartier Women's Initiative Award last year.

"To show that we can have ingenuity and innovation here and almost create a movement around waste and make people realize the importance of recycling and the environment -- I'm already seeing that but I want to see it on a really big scale all across Nigeria."




Source: CNN