Introduction
I used to walk by olososun waste dump every day to work sometime in 2018. And typically, no one passes by the dump and not cover their nostrils from the stench. However, one faithful day, things turned out for the worse as the dump exploded due to the accumulation of gas over the years from the heaps of waste piling over each other in chunks. Yes! Don’t be surprised, typically waste usually disposed contains both biodegradable and non-biodegradable; the non-biodegradables are the plastics, nylons, cartons, metals, and others. However, the degradable ones are the food waste which decays and is slowly converted into manure and methane gas as accumulation is achieved. Just imagine the decades olososun has been in existence, then imagine the amount of gas accumulated taking into consideration the population of Lagos state. Let me leave the maths to you. For weeks ojota-kosofe-ikosi axis was never the same. I was greatly concerned about the immediate impact and long-term impact of that occurrence. It then occurred to me, if I can imagine the number of items (non-biodegradables) going up in flames, used by the humongous population of Lagos; that’s for the ones that got to the dump safely. Others in your drainage and leading straight to our water bodies. It dawns on me we are going to have a very serious environmental challenge in the nearest future.
So when the Hackathon started during the first week of the IFA program, we were asked to pitch a problem that needs fixing. I could not think of any other than the problem of waste management. However, I was coming from a different point of view – recycling. Here is why- in my opinion, if recycling is emphasized, improved, more than 50% of our waste would be no more. However, it only opens up more challenges such as the availability of recycling hubs, how many persons even know what recycling is or why they need to recycling amongst other issues arising.
The Process
Firstly, IFA fellows with similar interests were grouped to begin to put their individual perspectives together, create a definitive problem statement and solution. However, this was not done arbitrarily but with the use of the Design Thinking process. Design Thinking can be summarized into five stages – Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, and Test. My team (Hackathon group 4) ensured that our individual perspectives passed through these stages carefully. Thus, in a bid to find a possible and feasible lasting, we tried to emphasize with users, understand their pain points, this helped us to define the problem as succinct as possible. This we did as we sent out some surveys to potential clients and got their feedback. The feedback was very insightful as it helped us ideate on the possible solutions. In the end, the team agreed to develop an application that connects an average waste generator (you and I) to nearby recycling firms, book for a recyclable pickup, and get rewarded for it. We believe this product would help to foster the realization of a circular economy, improve recycling significantly, and more importantly help to raise awareness on the impact of our negligence on the environment and possible future.
The Product/Service
G4cyclers (it was a real tug of war before we agreed on this name) is a product of a three weeks hackathon experience during the IFA Fellowship 2021 cycle program whose value proposition is quite unique and very interesting in the light of the way waste/ recycling is managed in Nigeria as a whole. It addresses the recycling firms' major challenge as regards digitization at a cheap and affordable monthly subscription cost while helping them to scale beyond their physical facilities as they leverage technology to expand their business and finances in the long run. On the other hand, the recyclers who have no means of actually recycling a resort to burning or indiscriminate disposal would have every reason to consciously recycle as they are certain they can connect to buyers and get some reward. One very outstanding value is the educative means we want to motivate recyclers to recycle often as against solely relying on the financial incentive which would work in the long term because of the imbalance of reward-to-effort ratio.
Reflection
From our Product Research Survey, we understood that the idea of using technology to solve recycling issues is not sufficient until or except a social element is factored in. In most cases and a possible blindspot for stakeholders in the recycling space, they are mostly focused on the post-dump stage as only illiterates and less-educated fellows would be interested in recycling by picking these items on the street. However, we chose to target the real source, waste generators, create awareness and consciousness about recycling, and enabling the recycling process via G4cyclers. This we know would help to drastically reduce recyclable littering our streets, in our drainages, and definitely, the ones entering our water bodies disrupting the marine ecosystem.
Personally, I came to understand why the IFA team was emphasizing the core values right from the onset. Truth be told if you don’t have these five or not able to learn and be teachable on:
1. Innovation
2. Open-mindedness
3. Grit
4. Growth-Mindset
5. Self-motivation
You definitely won’t survive the initial set of interviews. I have learned and re-learned and I am very confident that what skills I have acquired so far, I can use anywhere and add value to any organization.