Growing up, Faith Aweko had a special relationship with waste and always thought something is not waste unless you waste it. This perception actually got her in to trouble with her family who always complained about her habit of keeping waste around but she always insisted, “I can make them beautiful”.
Fast forward, a few years later, during her S.6 vacation, she started making jewelry from waste products like plastic bottles that she would sell to get pocket money for campus.
As luck would have it, her dream and passion to do something about plastic waste and transform her community for the better came true in 2017, when she joined the Social Innovation Academy in Mpigi where they were trained to find solutions to the challenges they faced in their communities.This took her back to her childhood.
Faith grew up in one of the slums of Kampala, Naguru Go Down, an area with one of the worst drainage in the city where most times it would rain, the trenches would get clogged up and floods would come into their homes and children would sometimes drown.
“I got to understand that the flooding is not actually caused by heavy rains, its due to the poor waste management we have in the area.”
She sat down with her team of four and came up with solutions to this problem. They hit the ground running by collecting waste and training people about waste management so that when it rains, the water would have a pathway where it would pass and houses wouldn’t get flooded.
However with time, they realized the plastic bottles they were collecting already had a recycling solution in place, unlike the plastic bags and most times they took them to recyclers they were met with rejection, arguing that they have no value.
“We began to research to find out what can be done with plastic kavera , we found out you can actually fuse them to make sustainable waterproof products like rain courts and bags.”
She realized this could also be a handy solution to the problems children from Naguru Go Down face due to flooding since whenever it rained they skipped school, or sometimes fall in floods and wet their books.
“I discovered that it also affects the education of kids so I wanted to do something that is sustainable and waterproof for the kids. That’s when I decided to do the bags. The bags are waterproof so even if they still go to school while it’s raining, their books would be safe”
Founded in September 2018, Reform Africa is a recycling company that transforms plastic bags into
sustainable waterproof bags and employs women.
They collect waste from different parts of the country like the landfills in Kitezi where all the waste in Kampala is dumped, Mbarara, Mpigi, among others. The waste is then sorted out and washed before its fused using flatirons and tailored into bags. Faith says she started the business with a capital of Shs. 100,000 because their main raw materials, waste is free and available everywhere.
“We began with 5 bags and then we sold them all, got money, reinvested it to make more. The tailors are paid when the bags are sold”
The company currently employs 2 people full time and 5-10 part time.
A few months later, business is booming with a number of tangible results registered. They have bought their own sawing machine, secured 3 shops that they distribute their bags to for sale, attended exhibitions, and partnered with schools like Seven Hills International and International School of Uganda (ISU) to offer recycling training to the students, among others.
The future is even brighter for Faith as she plans on expansion and having a recycling plant that will help train local people how to make sustainable products from waste.
“There’s a lot of wealth in recycling. We want to turn Africa’s waste into wealth and to find sustainable ways of using all kinds of waste.”
However, among the challenges the company faces, she points out, is lack of support from Ugandans who don’t “fancy” the bags, leaving them for expatriates, tourists and foreigners. “Much as the tourists are paying a higher price for their products, it would be great if the people using the products are mainly from Uganda.”
Additionally, she points out, most Ugandans don’t see any value in waste and think climate change is something that will happen in the future, probably 100 years from now so they downplay the effects of plastic to the environment.
In her entrepreneurship journey she has made a few mistakes that she wishes she could have avoided. Laxity in managing books of accounts takes the cake. Initially she relied on guess work to ascertain the number of bags she has sold and did not record down the expenditures and income. However, she has since learnt from it and is putting up proper accountability structures in place like having requisition books, use of receipts and noting down transactions made.
The two attributes that Faith credits her success to are patience and perseverance. “Sometimes the team can say something is not going to work out but I will just tell them to go and then spend the next 5 hours trying to make it work. I always believe if someone has done something, or if something is being done somewhere then that means I can also do it.”
Faith advices aspiring recycling entrepreneurs to start small and with what is around them.
“Don’t wait for big investments because no one can invest in something that is not there, they want to see something running and then maybe support you. There’s huge sums of plastic that is lying around, you can start with picking or with buying the little plastic waste from the collectors around”.
Her best read is ‘The Alchemist’ by Paulo Couelho. “I loved how the boy followed his passion despite the challenges because on your way to self-discovery, you will also feel uncomfortable and its easy to get lost.”
