Tanzania’s urban areas do not have formalized systems for the disposal of used plastic bottles and bags. Piles of plastic waste accumulate in waterways and along streets in neighborhoods across Dar es Salaam, creating breeding environments for malaria-carrying mosquitos, allowing unsafe chemical seepage into water sources and soils, and developing generally unsanitary conditions in dense urban areas. To address environmental impacts of plastic use and production in Dar es Salaam and provide youth with simple after-school income-generating activities and training in personal and environment health management, EcoVentures International (EVI) and the Environmental Enterprise Development Initiative (EEDI), a coalition of cross-sectoral local organizations originally organized by EVI, worked together on a basic value chain assessment of the plastics recycling industry.
There are several plastics companies in Dar es Salaam manufacturing plastic shoes, buckets, and fences. Until 2005, these plastics companies imported the virgin plastic inputs for the manufacturing process. The EVI/EEDI assessment highlighted micro and small enterprise opportunities for unemployed youth in processing used plastics for recycling and reuse in the local plastics industry. An EEDI partner, Environment Based Poverty Alleviation, established a start-up enterprise for plastics collection and recycling, beginning by working with a few older jobless youths sourcing plastics from dump sites.
In order to reach the large volumes of plastics demanded, the enterprise tapped into the youth population to provide them with an easy way to contribute to the clean-up of their community, instilling a sense of social responsibility, and to generate income in a way that would not interfere with school activities. Youth are trained in basic protective health and sanitation skills and provided with protective equipment to use when doing their individual collection.
As the enterprise develops it has been able to take advantage of relationships with key market actors and grow its operations, first by contracting trucks to transport the plastic to a sorting facility. Financing from plastics manufacturers who used the lower-cost recycled plastic product facilitated investment into recycling equipment and expanded their capacity for production of recycled plastic pellets that had even more value to the plastics manufacturers in the region. The recycling enterprise has retooled its business model to make plastics processing and pelletization its primary function, and it continues to contract a network of youth plastics collectors to feed the demand for plastic waste while providing an important service of removing harmful waste plastics from communities, enabling youth to create a safer community while contributing to their own and their families’ well-being.
Kate Davenport
kate@eco-ventures.org
loveLife is the national HIV prevention program for youth in South Africa. Over the next two years, it is focusing on the Make Your Move Campaign, the goal of which is to change the mindsets of youth to understand that change is possible through small actions on a daily basis that can help them to protect themselves from HIV/AIDS and to make positive steps towards a socially and economically productive life.
To support the campaign, the South African Institute for Entrepreneurship (SAIE) is developing entrepreneurship and life skills tools that simulate choices that youth are faced with every day. These tools make it possible for youth to understand and discuss dilemmas and trade-offs in a safe environment, helping them to make positive choices in the real world. Part of making those positive choices relies in being able to make sound financial decisions. SAIE’s entrepreneurship curriculum addresses basic financial literacy while training youth to think about business and their life from an entrepreneurial perspective and preparing them with skills to help them to successfully achieve their personal, career, or business goals.
To implement the program, unemployed youth aged 18-25, called groundbreakers (gBs), are trained to guide a team of volunteer youth ages 12-17 through the different tools so that they utilize the entrepreneurship and decision-making skills on a day-to-day basis, and in turn can be positive leaders amongst their peers. Currently 95% of 15-year-old South African youth are HIV-negative, and loveLife hopes that by training older youths to be positive role models for their younger peers, they can help to keep them away from risky behaviors and to make healthy life choices. gBs in the program are additionally equipped with skills that can help them to gain employment or to start their own business.
Robin Coxson
robin@entrepreneurship.co.za
Location
Some of the most successful youth empowerment initiatives are those that are started by visionary youth who understand the issues and challenges that they and their peers face and have a visionary perspective on how to improve their situation. Such is the case in the Kibera slum of Nairobi, where the youth-initiated and youth-run Kibera Community Youth Program (KCYP) has been offering jobless, vulnerable youth positive activities, such as sport and drama, to provide an alternative to more destructive activities prevalent in the community, such as drugs, gangs, and prostitution. They also have health education programs to inform youth about HIV/AIDS and associated risk factors and protective measures.
In order to support their activities, the leaders of KCYP realized that they needed a sustainable form of income. They wanted to be able to provide a service that could generate income while continuing to serve their mission of advancing the well-being of the youth of Kibera. A need cited in the community was a lack of access to information, which in Kibera comes primarily through radio and cell phones. However most individuals in Kibera lack access to electricity to charge their phones and/or do not have free income for the continual purchase of batteries to power their radios. A potential solution was identified in portable mini-solar panels that could be manufactured at low-cost by the youth of KCYP.
EcoVentures International, a long-time partner of KCYP, worked with the organization to provide technical assistance with business plan development and with building sustainable market linkages for the mini-solar panel business. Youth are trained in the assembly of panels and proceeds from the sale of the panels are shared between the individuals and the organization, providing these vulnerable youth with an income generating opportunity while helping to sustain the organization’s community activities that provide additional opportunities and benefits to many more youth and street children in the Kibera community, engaging them in a positive, peer-structured environment.
Kate Davenport
kate@eco-ventures.org
