Makafui Awuku has slept on a bench, hunted in the bush, worked at a church and sifted through mountains of plastic waste. He is the man turning trash into cash in Ghana.

Thirtyfive-year-old Makafui Awuku has been through enough pain and penury in life to see beauty in the little things. He is the man who can turn plastic scrap to nifty objects of desire.
His is a life filled with odd, interesting assignments.
It is easy to see why Awuku is not particularly fond of his early years. The social entrepreneur and founder of Mckingtorch Creatives did not have a privileged life.
Born in Keta, Sogakope, in the Volta Region of Ghana, his father, who was a driver, passed away when he was aged 12 leaving Awuku, his sister and mother to fend for themselves. Surviving on his mother’s income as a nurse was not enough for Makafui to achieve his dream of becoming a doctor. Instead, he had to depend on his wits for survival.
He would hunt with a catapult in the bush and even started his own poultry farm to generate extra income. Then in 2005, life became grimmer.
His mother passed away from a stroke and Awuku found himself stranded with no help.
Armed with just $1,000 from his mother’s pension contribution, he moved to Ghana’s capital city, Accra, in search of greener pastures.

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<blockquote>&#8220;There was a lot of waste generated during board meetings,&#8221;</blockquote>
That same year, he got admission to study marketing at the Institute of Professional Services but the money he made was not enough to pay tuition fees.
“I have struggled most of my way through life. I have slept on a bench in Accra and I have also slept at a 24-hour internet café. I didn’t have anywhere to sleep, so I decided to just spend the night behind the computer there. While in school, I had to find part-time work to pay my fees and pay my medical bills as I had asthma,” says Awuku.
He would do assignments for his colleagues and charge them for it, and also pick up odd jobs such as being a part-time soccer teacher for an international school in Accra. But he eventually had to drop out of school because he couldn’t afford it.
“I eventually met one of my mentors and supporters, Reverend Richard C. Whitcomb, a senior overseer of the Agape House New Testament Church in East Legon. He gave me a job at the church, then he helped pay my rent and then when I had to go back after I deferred my final year, he helped pay my tuition fees too.”
Awuku published his first book in 2015, The Tertiary Years, to address inefficiencies in the education system in Ghana and help young students build leadership skills.
That was followed by his social project called Student Initiative Ghana, a platform for the personal development and training of young people.
“I have visited over 15 schools and trained over 80,000 people over the last 15 years in the areas of brain-training and memory enhancement and helped young people with learning difficulties.”
He subsequently gained admission to the Young African Leaders Initiative (YALI) program created by former American President Barack Obama in his early years at the White House to develop the leadership of young people in Africa creating value in their communities.
“I spent five weeks in Nigeria at the Administrative Staff College in Badagry. I returned to Ghana to do an internship program. I worked with the One Ghana Movement and one of the programs they were doing was on sanitation. The team was going to be buying 1,000 bins and installing it in various places in Accra in partnership with the Accra Metropolitan Assembly,” says Awuku.
This is when he found his Eureka moment.
<a href="http://www.forbesafrica.com/woman/2018/04/18/roll-used-tyres/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">READ MORE: On A Roll With Used Tyres</a>
“While I was doing the internship, I realized there was a lot of waste generated during board meetings. I decided I wanted to do something about this. I looked through the 17 Sustainable Development Goals and I looked at the plastic waste problem. I said to myself, ‘I took a course on waste management at university and I am a fan of clean environment, so let me do something with sustainable communities and cities which the plastic waste falls under’,” avers Awuku.
A 2002 report by the African Development Bank said that Ghana generated about 3.6 million tonnes of solid waste per year made up predominantly of food, plastic and wood. Awuku decided to join the fight to clean up Accra’s streets. He started Mckingtorch Creatives in January 2018 to turn plastic waste into art.
“So I started collecting bottles from the office and decided to try designing a Christmas tree from plastic waste. I got a welder to install a frame for me that looked like a frame for a tree and I decided to buy ropes. I would drill holes under the bottles and on top of the bottles and pass the ropes through them and install them on the tree. A day before Christmas, I had finished the tree. I bought lights and put them up and there were actually 396 plastic bottles on that tree,” says Awuku.
He installed his new creation in a major street in Madina, a suburb in Accra.
“I realized that it was changing people’s attitudes, they were shocked that plastic waste and bottles could be used in this manner. So I decided that I could take things a lot further and look at modeling some solutions I could develop using plastic waste,” says Awuku.
Some of his creations include flower pots, bins, wall-hangings and even sandals.
He also teamed up with one of the biggest manufacturers of bottled water in Ghana to create a fence with over 10,000 bottles for World Environment Day.
Awuku is determined to tell the youth that there can be workable solutions for waste and that they can be a pertinent part of building a planet free of plastic.

IMG_3564

Ghana’s Wastepreneur

The drive to Zimbabwe’s capital, Harare, is slippery in light winter rain. The sky is full of rich grey clouds; on the ground, the country is paved with cracked roads, poverty and struggle.
On the way, many businesses are boarded up, their paint peeling and doors closed. As we arrive in Harare, many shops are packed with imported goods, but, in Workington, an industrial suburb in the south west of Harare, there is a stubborn survivor – a factory that has been producing Zimbabwean products since 1978.
Rank, founded by Amish and Ketan Naik’s grandfather, is the leading stationery supplier in Zimbabwe. It also distributes paper and board to the printing industry and manufactures plastic goods. Their grandfather arrived in Zimbabwe, via Zambia, from India in the late 1960s.
Business in Zimbabwe thrived until the country hit hyperinflation in the early 2000s. Although the factory is stacked with goods and 102 employees, like many businesses here, the lack of money in the banks threatens its survival.
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The company has ample money in the bank but it can’t take it out to buy raw materials.
“We are being optimistic because if we are being pessimistic about this whole thing it won’t end well. We have been breaking even for the last six months, last year we were 3.5 percent down. We believe this year we are going to be 20 percent down or probably more,” says Ketan.
The company will cut the number of goods they produce to survive. They say they will try managing their overheads, because their staff is the last cost they want to cut.
“We will work within our means; effectively we will produce what we can in terms of what we can purchase in terms of raw material. It also means we have narrowed our gains down, guided by our industry,” he says.
It’s been a struggle over the last decade to keep the doors open.
“We had to scale down to the minimum. We were down to almost 10 percent, or less than 10 percent, because we were trading simply to pay wages. In the past, during high inflation, it came down to where our staff would just come in to have a meal because by the time they got their money, and went home, it was worthless,” says Amish.
The Naik brothers say their biggest threat is the weak economy. In a way, the recent ban on basic goods imports, which everyone is complaining about, may help companies like them.
“We estimated, for example, that in the exercise book industry, 40 percent was being imported from South Africa and 60 percent bought here. The tariff protection came in August 2015 and there has been a shift, we can say nine to ten percent or so increase, on our manufacturing, and the statistical growth shows it boosted our production,” says Amish.
Another Zimbabwean entrepreneur, Frank Buyanga, with a finger on the pulse, featured in FORBES AFRICA in 2013 when he had an Interpol notice imposed on him by government. He is back in business in Zimbabwe and thinks that the ban on imports is sensible as it protects home-grown industry.
“The advantages of doing business in Zimbabwe are the highly educated and generally honest workforce, good infrastructure and sophisticated business climate, especially when compared to other countries in Africa, except Botswana, Namibia and South Africa. The main disadvantage is the increasing level of corruption,” says Buyanga.
Ketan agrees the ban could work; but not with a weak economy.
“It doesn’t help as much because where there is a shortage created by us not having raw materials, the smugglers start because they now see an opportunity. If there is a shortage in the market of the product, the pricing would mean 50 percent mark-up”.
Even Rank’s suppliers are not happy.
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“Our suppliers are saying to us that, ‘Guys we have supplied the goods you need to pay for those’. We have sort of done a reverse circle where initially we had to pay upfront; we built our relationships so that they provide us with credit facilities. Now we are ok, the credit facilities need to be reduced to zero and start paying upfront because we are not able to sustain them,” says Ketan.
Making a bit of money through exports into neighboring countries is not an option because it is expensive to manufacture products in Zimbabwe.
“A Malawian manufacturer, for example, would buy raw materials from the same places as us. But, we would pay let’s say $300 for a job yet they would pay less than $100 for that same job. How do we compete? Their expenses become lower, therefore their goods are cheaper.”
Rank is not the only Zimbabwean company running a tight ship.
On the other side of Harare, Melissa Mafunga, Managing Director at Hamilton Finance, says 30 to 50 people walk into their offices each day seeking to borrow money, most of these, struggling small business owners.
“Sometimes they come borrow money because they want to buy stock or pay a little bit of salaries. From here, I see that many small businesses are run on credit. Due to the cash challenges the country is facing, the default rate has risen by 75 percent this year. So we make sure we hold collateral before we lend out money,” she says.
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Joyce Nousenga, General Manager at Hamilton Insurance, says business is slow because insurance is at the bottom of the list for companies.
“Even companies are slowing down on their purchase of insurance and most people opt for minimal cover, of which most of it is statutory. Business is tough for everyone, so much that they can’t even protect the little they have through comprehensive insurance,” she says.
We leave Amish and Ketan with hope that they will carry on breaking even in a country that is struggling to do so.

The Breakeven Blues

Aschool bag that doubles as a solar-powered light? You could expect the inventor to be a scientist.
Think again. Thato Kgatlhanye is a 22-year-old who studied art in high school and obtained a brand management degree at Vega School of Brand Leadership without studying a day of science. Kgatlhanye’s company, Repurpose Schoolbags, has won about $40,000 in competitions.
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“The start-up capital came from a business grant of $23,433 that I won in the first competition. I entered the business into the South African Breweries Foundation Innovation Awards and we came second. I’ve recently been selected as a sub-Saharan Africa finalist for the Cartier Women’s Initiative Awards, so in September I’ll be in Paris to attend that,” she says.
Kgatlhanye grew up in Mogwase, one of the townships near the mining town of Rustenburg, in South Africa’s North West province. Her father is a taxi owner and her mother is a nurse.
The idea for her bag came in the second year of college when her class was tasked to find ways of doing more with nothing. She decided to make a bag out of recycled plastic bags. The solar-powered light idea only came after a conversation she had with her mother where she was told to channel her creativity towards helping others.
“My mother told me about how she grew up and used candles to study. If she had one candle for the week and it burned out on Wednesday, she wouldn’t be able to study on Thursday and Friday. That inspired the idea,” says Kgatlhanye.
Her company in Rustenburg, which employs 17 people, designs schoolbags out of recycled plastic and integrates a solar cell which can be charged during the day and used as a study lamplight in the evening.
They make these bags for banks and companies who give them to schools. She doesn’t make more than 500 bags at a time, with one bag costing $20.
“Some of our giving partners include Red Bull, Standard bank, PricewaterhouseCoopers, SAB, ABSA/Barclays, MTN Foundation and CPSI,” says Kgatlhanye.
At a time when power cuts, so-called load shedding, loom in South Africa, Kgatlhanye’s company is well timed.
“Thank heavens for what’s playing out,” chuckles Kgatlhanye.
“Load shedding has made the business an easier sell. The big guys that sign the cheques that didn’t understand before the kind of environment we were talking about, now understand because guess what, their child gets affected by load shedding. They’ll be like ‘oh because of load shedding’ and I’m like, almost, except they don’t have electricity at all,” says Kgatlhanye.
Kgatlhanye is looking to shed light in 24 African countries.
<h4>A Spark In The Nick Of Time</h4>
The flow of renewable energy from the REIPPP couldn’t’ve come at a better time, says energy expert Chris Yelland. Eskom’s aging fleet of power stations, many built more than 30 years ago, cannot meet the demand. They have also been burdened by delays in other power generating projects in South Africa, like the Medupi and Kusile coal-powered plants.
“When Medupi and Kusile are online they will add 25% capacity to the grid. This is great. The only trouble is it should have happened 10 years ago. Between 1999 and 2004, there was a delay as a result of policy decision. Construction started in 2007 and 2008,” says Yelland.
When Medupi’s first unit came online, it was four years late. The cost keeps growing; initially it was expected to cost $2.5 billion, but is now forecasted at more than $23 billion. Kusile (4,800MW) has also failed to escape. Its first unit was expected in 2013, but has been pushed to 2017, and will cost around $92 billion, excluding the interest on delays.
Yelland is a Johannesburg-based electrical engineer turned energy journalist and entrepreneur. He has had a lot to talk about over the last 10 years, but his favorite story is the work of renewable energy dreamers.
“That’s the only success story we have to tell. The success stories are not government success stories, they are private: private capital, private technology – built, owned and operated privately, and generated into the grid,” he says.
Yelland warns that renewables should not be South Africa’s only solution.
“It costs less to produce coal-fired electricity than renewable if you compare apples with apples. If you look at the existing fleet of power stations, the cost per kilowatt hour is certainly lower than the cost to produce renewable energy. But the cost of electricity from a new power station, like Medupi, is a lot higher than the average costs. Because that capital cost is higher.”
For Africa, energy at any price is welcome.

Tag: Plastic

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