Q&A: Inclusivity is key to waste management

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The success of waste management efforts depends on collaboration across sectors. This is according to Victor Akinmuyiwa, Founder and Executive Director of Greening Up Africa, a Nigeria-based waste startup. He emphasises that real progress hinges on including everyone—especially marginalized groups at the grassroots.

• Victor is a Health, Safety, Environment, and Quality (HSEQ) Consultant with over a decade of experience in environmental management and sustainability.

• According to the UNDP, while the waste management economy remains largely informal, with a significant number of workers drawn from marginalised groups, conversations around inclusivity are still often overlooked.

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This interview was first published by The Nation

Tell me about GreeningUp Africa and your ongoing project.

Victor Akinmuyiwa: Greening Up Africa is a non-governmental organisation focused on climate action. We are trying to support climate action initiatives that make people adaptable to the impact of climate change. We have different types of initiatives and one of them is our ongoing project Green Impact Nigeria where we are striving to  increase accessibility to vulnerable people – youths, women, specially uneducated women, to empower them on climate action. 

For example, we do what we call recycling training for them. From there we are able to reward them for taking up recycling. Many of them get food items for their efforts and also make money. The message is to let them know that while they’re trying to make the environment clean/sustainable, they can also make money along the line. We do climate smart agriculture initiatives like helping rural women learn new climate smart agriculture skills; how to also focus on renewable energy for some of their farm /agriculture activities, to be able to cut emissions. We do tree-planting and all kinds of climate action initiatives in different phases and forms. 

Is there any special reason for zeroing down on Nigeria’s third largest city, Ibadan for this initiative?

Victor Akinmuyiwa: First, our organisation is actually based in Lagos, but we are not going to be focusing on Ibadan alone for this project. For instance, we are going to be in Odeda in Ogun State in the next two weeks, where we will be going into the village to engage the women on climate action, using Yoruba to communicate. We just chose Ibadan because Ibadan has a history of environmental challenges.

I watched a video of your programme and saw where women were giving testimonies of how this process of picking up waste to generate wealth has changed their lives financially; just how profitable is this venture?

Victor Akinmuyiwa: In that video, one of the women was also talking about how she started a couple of years ago when a kilogram of plastic was N50 ($0.03) but it has grown to N700 ($0.44). So the more plastics you’re able to gather, the more money you make. I started as co-founder with Recycledge in Ibadan before moving on to found Greening Up Africa, so we’ve come up with a lot of initiatives to attract people to waste to wealth. For example there was a project we did called ‘PET for tuition’, where public school students who were struggling to meet up with their tuition fees , were engaged in collecting wastes from their schools and were able to pay their school fees and also buy books. So the sector is promising, which is why we are alerting the underserved, so that they can also tap into it.

World Global Recycling Day held on March 18, how well did you mark it?

Victor Akinmuyiwa: A lot of organisations/individuals came out to do cleaning up events; some went out to teach people in markets, public places to do advocacies and talks on the importance of recycling wastes and not just burning them. A couple of organisations came up with webinars on Linkedin and other social media platforms. So it may not have gained traction like International Women’s Day, but the event was still celebrated. We had a guest feature on radio where we got to interact with online guest personalities discussing recycling and what is in it for the people.

Funding is a key challenge for startups especially in the waste management sector. How are you keeping the lights on?

Victor Akinmuyiwa: This project of promoting inclusion of marginalised persons in waste collection is supported by CimateKick; ClimateKick is one of Europe’s foremost climate innovation agencies. We do not make money, we are a non-governmental organisation. What we’re doing is to empower the people, so that they make the money. I also use my own funds to be able to do these things.

How do you think this project would impact the lives of the people going forward?

Victor Akinmuyiwa: First we’re certain that this project is going to encourage more people to come into the recycling space and do more for the environment. We’re looking forward to ensuring that through this project, people become more environmentally conscious and also significantly reduce illegitimate dumping of refuse or solid wastes on the community.  

With the Green Impact Nigeria project, we also believe that sustainable livelihood of the people in Ibadan will improve. We are expecting that people who are jobless would have something to do, because we are communicating to them that recycling is a noble job, not just something meant for the lowly. It will help lift them out of poverty and in the long run, help us take plastic away from our water channels and help reduce cases of flooding in our communities.