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Nigerian #youforG20 winner keeps succeeding despite obstacles
Vicfold Recyclers from Nigeria was the winner of the #youforG20 contest. Founder Amusa Victor esplains what has happened since then, including current challenges and successes.
After the excitement of winning the #youforG20 contest, which was organised by the German Foreign Office, Vicfold Recyclers is all set for scale-up.
He explains what has happened since he won the #youforG20 contest:
“As excited as we are, there are unique challenges that likewise come with scale-up.
Like we clearly stated during our application for the #youforG20 contest, we are interested in using the prize money to procure recycling machines that can help us convert our collected plastic waste to useful resin pellets that can be sold to manufacturing firms around us.
The first challenge was finding vendors, because it’s a virtually new niche with very few players. After much consultations and bargains we were able to secure affordable quotes from a vendor at Akure, Ondo State, South West Nigeria.
The timeline for delivery and commissioning of the recycling machine is set as eight weeks which puts our expected date of commencement of machine processing of waste tentative at November 20, 2017.
Within this timeframe we have to secure a factory site and build structures that will house the machines.
In the past week with other supports, we were able to acquire a factory site at a location with very stable power supply, site was cleared, borehole was sunk and building of factory structure is on-going.
However, more residents are subscribing to our reward4waste initiative as the publicity given to our operations is yielding desired results.
Although we are now daily confronted by the huge problem of logistics as to our door to door collection of waste, we have temporarily decided to make use of my car as a waste cart until we are able to purchase tricycles for more robust door to door collection of plastic waste from subscribers.
It is worth mentioning that a lot of interested prospective subscribers are also calling our help desk line to enquire about the possibility of Vicfold Recyclers spreading its operations to other parts of Kwara state.
We are seriously contemplating on the expansion of our operations to other locations in Kwara state like Offa, Oro, Omu-Aran, but the major challenge is that of logistics – collection buses and tricycles.
We are optimistic that soon we will overcome these challenges and make good our scale up plan.”
