U-recycle Initiative Africa Graduates 30 Young Women Tackling Pollution in Nigeria

Kayode Tokede

U-recycle Initiative Africa recently has its plastic-wise fellowship graduation ceremony to celebrate 30 young women leading change across Nigeria towards tackling plastic pollution.

Speaking at a press briefing in Lagos recently, the Co-founder, U-recycle Initiative Africa, Oluwaseyi Moetoh, said the ceremony was important because for a very long time, young women and their voices have been undermined in this particular space.

She noted that through the fellowship programme, the non-profit-organisation is telling Nigeria and the world that young women are full of potential, and if given the right platform, resources and tools, they can catalyse meaningful change.

She said the U-recycle Initiative Africa is a youth-led non-profit organisation focused on advancing circular economy, environmental sustainability and climate action.

Established September 2018, Moetoh  expressed that the organisation has gained its position in empowering the next generation of changemakers and problem solvers towards tackling plastic pollution and climate change in Africa, starting from Nigeria and beyond.

Speaking further she said: “Recently, we launched the plastic waste by recycling initiative Africa. This is a transformative campaign and comprehensive leadership development program focused on empowering young women to catalyse behavioural change towards reducing plastic waste and pollution on their campuses in order to mitigate marine plastic pollution.

“We started this fellowship in September 2022 and over the last seven months and counting, our fellows across six states in Nigeria, have gone on to deploy amazing projects focused on making young people more concerned about the issue of plastic pollution and not just being concerned, but also taking action.

“As solution has multiple strategies, but it is broadly divided into two spheres. We have the capacity building sphere and we have the creative interventions.

“On our capacity buildings sphere, we have the fellowship which is the all-female Fellowship for Young women across Nigeria and these are female students. They are from University of Lagos to Obafemi Awolowo University to Lautech in Oyo state, among other schools across the country.

“We launched a bootcamp in August/September to explore how young women can leverage innovation to tackle the issue of plastic pollution and how they can become better leaders in their spaces. And for this, we had almost 200 female students joining from over 35 institutions in Nigeria.

“We had workshops across the different universities in six states. And we also leverage the power of research to explore how can we harness information and data to tackle this problem.

“We interacted with restaurants, and also went to the schools to observe the issue at hand to see how we can solve this problem. One thing stood out, universities are generating a lot of plastic waste and we need to end this from the roots, the mind. By  inspiring and educating young people about the harmful effects of plastic. They can regulate their use of plastic and also take actions like reducing, reusing and recycling.

 On future prospect, she added that U-recycle Initiative Africa mentorship programme is coming up with installation of innovation hub in the near future.

She added: “On our creative interventions, we have a campus network leveraging the power of community to drive change. We have plastic waste 21-day challenge platform a revolutionary new platform leveraging the power of technology to accelerate Climate Education towards tackling plastic pollution, climate change, and biodiversity loss.

“These are triple planetary crisis, threatening the survival and future of our planets. We have a policy scheme where we actually interacted with ministries earlier this year we had when we interact with officials from the Ministry of Environment, Ministry of Education, Ministry of Youth and Sports, the National orientation agency, but to mention a few about ways you can harness their platform and influence to catalyse policies that can help eradicate the excessive generation of plastic waste across campuses and Universities throughout Nigeria.”