Only about 40% of the waste created in Lagos, Nigeria is actually collected by waste management companies. The other 60% is a breeding ground for many diseases, potential for increased flooding is heightened and the psychological effects of living in an environment with an increasing heap of rubbish is evident especially in low-income communities.

Meet Bilikiss Adebiyi-Abiola, CEO and Co-Founder of Wecyclers , who is changing the face of what used to be an obscure and vague concept of recycling in a country like Nigeria into something tangible, profitable and environmentally effective in cleaning up Lagos one community at a time.

With new reforms to transform waste management and sanitation in system in Nigeria, Bilikiss is here to solve a growing problem for Lagosians by incentivizing recycling directly on their mobile devices.

Early Life

Bilikiss Adebiyi-Abiola was born in Lagos, Nigeria, into a family of 5. She attended Corona, Ikoyi, for her primary School, and then Supreme Education Foundation for Secondary School after which she proceeded to obtain t a Law degree at the University of Lagos, but ended up staying for just a year before leaving for the US to study Computer Science at Fisk University.
Bilikiss also bags a masters degree from Vanderbilt University and a MBA from Massachesetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Sloan School of Management. During Bilikiss’s second year in MIT, the drive to start a recycling business hit her.

Be Inspired

While in school , Bilikiss studied waste as her specialised subject. She thought of a way to collect waste from households by offering them raffle tickets in exchange for their waste products. She discussed it with her family and friends in Nigeria when she was back home for the holidays. The response she got was amazing, and then, she knew she was on to something big, although most Americans didn’t exactly understand her idea at the time.

According to her ” We had been working on the idea for a while but it didn’t really take off. When you’re looking at something, you now start to notice other things, so that helped me see that waste is a problem. I got into MIT Sloan and started learning about people that live at the bottom of the income pyramid (people living on less than $2(N800) a day). While working on a project to help these households in developing countries, I decided to work on waste – focusing on its uses, collection and processing.”

Unlocking Nigeria’s Recycling Potentials

Now convinced by the mild validity she had gotten from her research, she returned to MIT and entered the school’s Ideas Global Challenge with her recycling plan, where she got immense support and encouragement to start up her business. This was after she and her brother had tried to run a scrap metal venture that didn’t go according to plan.
After the project was completed, she conducted additional research focusing on Nigeria and saw the huge potential in the waste recycling sector, especially among the manufacturing plants who are hungry for a cheaper and easily available source of raw materials due to local and foreign demand for end products. “I realized I was on the right career path because my work, which promotes a healthy environment and helps households create value from their waste aligns with my passion for building sustainable models for waste collection and reuse. I’m using my background in computer science and technology to solve a critical societal challenge.”

The Birth of Wecyclers

After her education, she worked as a Software Engineer at IBM, one of the largest companies in the world building social networking software that served thousands of users at Fortune 500 companies. Her work was very important, but she always wanted to do something different. After five years, she quit her job and returned to Nigeria to pursue her dreams. In 2011, she Co-founded a recycling business with her brother, Olawale Adebiyi , and called it ” Wecyclers”.
y this time, Bilikiss Adebiyi-Abiola was already married, and would take a tricycle to do some plastic collections herself during the day in order to understand the business, while her children were away at school.

A Win-Win Game

What her company Wecyclers practically did was to collect recyclable waste items like plastic bottles, aluminum cans and plastic sachets from thousands of low-income households in Lagos, after which the contributors would receive points via SMS,

http://digitalclique.com.ng/meet-bilikiss-the-female-entrepreneur-that-makes-millions-from-your-waste/

K