"Diplomacy & Development" Interview Constance Agyeman (Director of International Development, Nesta Challenges) about the Afri-Plastics Challenge

Constance Agyeman, Director of International Development, Nesta Challenges

On the 21st of July 2021, Nesta Challenges announced  the launch of the Afri-Plastics Challenge (http://afri-plastics.challenges.org/). 

The Challenge will involve a public competition that will reward the best solutions from across sub-Saharan Africa to addressing marine plastic waste in developing countries in a way that promotes gender equality and empowerment of women and girls.

The competition's first strand, Accelerating Growth, invites entrepreneurs from across Sub-Saharan Africa to showcase their best innovations designed to improve plastic waste management in a socially and environmentally responsible way, and to reduce the presence of marine plastic litter across Sub-Saharan Africa. The Challenge calls for applications from registered non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and small and medium-sized enterprises (SME) that have proof of concept and the ability to scale nationally or regionally to reach a high target number of people, particularly engaging women and girls.

Over 17 million tonnes of waste are generated by Sub-Saharan Africa annually, and only 12% of plastic waste is recycled. The Afri-Plastics Challenge seeks to find innovators with scalable and sustainable solutions to prevent plastic waste from entering the marine environment in Sub-Saharan Africa. While not limited by gender, the Challenge encourages women and girls to participate by submitting their solutions.

Over 220 million tonnes of plastic are produced each year across the world, and much of it ends up in oceans and other water bodies. In many African countries, approximately 12% of waste plastics are recycled and the rest are disposed of, burned or buried.

To talk about this project, Diplomacy & Development spoke with Mrs. Constance Agyeman, Director of International Development, Nesta Challenges.

Diploamcy & Development: Who is Nesta Challenges? What is the idea behind the Afri-Plastics Challenge?

Constance Agyeman: Nesta Challenges exists to run challenge prizes that help solve pressing problems that lack solutions. We shine a spotlight where it matters and incentivise people to solve these issues. We are independent supporters of change to help communities thrive and inspire the best placed, most diverse groups of people around the world to take action. We support the boldest and bravest ideas to become real, and seed long term change to advance society and build a better future for everyone. We are part of the innovation foundation, Nesta.

The Afri-Plastics Challenge is a prize funded by the Government of Canada; it is an element of the $100-million Marine Litter Mitigation Fund announced by Prime Minister Trudeau at the G7 Leaders’ Summit in Charlevoix in June 2018.

The Afri-Plastic Challenge aims to help communities throughout Sub-Saharan Africa to prevent plastic waste from entering the marine environment by finding ways to minimize reliance on plastic and new ways of managing plastic waste.

The Afri-Plastics Challenge Strand 1: Accelerating Growth is looking to achieve the following:

Scale existing solutions that improve plastic waste management in a socially and environmentally responsible way, to reduce the presence of marine plastic litter across Sub-Saharan Africa.

By the end of the Challenge successful solutions for Strand 1 will have demonstrated an effective, sustainable and replicable model for significantly increasing their collection and processing of plastic waste, as well as the empowerment of women and girls.

Diplomacy & Development: Why does the Challenge emphasize on gender equality and empowerment of women and girls?

Constance Agyeman: The Afri-Plastics Challenge aims to reduce marine plastics in Sub-Saharan African countries by developing and scaling innovative solutions to plastic mismanagement in a way that promotes gender equality and empowerment of women and girls.

Women play an important role as both innovators and workers in the waste management sector, particularly in an informal capacity. 

This Challenge is designed to help promote gender equality and tackle some of the barriers women currently face in the sector. For example, studies seem to indicate that women tend to be more present in the informal sector due to obstacles in participating in formal labour and a need for flexible employment to meet the demands of childcare responsibilities.  Woman-owned businesses also tend to have fewer employees and lower average sales-, when compared to man-owned businesses.

Diplomacy & Development: How does the Challenge aim to support and amplify the current role that women and girls have in the plastic waste management section? 

Constance Agyeman:  We know that women and girls play an important role in key areas of waste management, but that they also face social stigma for the work they do in the plastics value chain (as waste pickers for example). As part of this, they face risks to their physical security, health hazards, exposure to harassment, and balancing childcare responsibilities with the need to secure income. 

But alongside Sub-Saharan Africa having among the highest entrepreneurship rates in the world, it also has the highest rates of total early-stage entrepreneurial activity for women, with women participating at equal or nearly equal rates in most countries. As such, there are huge opportunities to support gender equality and empowerment for women working across the plastic value chain range from setting up safeguarding measures through the semi-formalization of informal work, adding co-benefits such as childcare support or health checks to programmes, providing upskilling and training opportunities, and incentivising the inclusion of women as part of the leadership of organizations operating in the sector.

Diplomacy & Development: The Challenge's first strand, Accelerating Growth, invites entrepreneurs from across Sub-Saharan Africa to showcase their best innovations designed to improve plastic waste management.

Can you provide examples of what type of innovations you are looking for and what organisations can apply to participate in the Challenge?

Constance Agyeman: Innovation is not just about the development of new technologies – it can mean setting up new processes, business models or systems to support activities; or collaborating in new ways. Through the Afri-Plastics Challenge Strand 1 Accelerating Growth, we are looking for existing solutions to improve plastic waste management that can be scaled throughout the duration of the Challenge and beyond. Examples of a few of the types of organisations (and not limited to) that may be interested in applying and scaling their businesses include; small-medium scale recyclers, waste picking organisations, waste management enterprises or small-medium buy-back centres.

Diplomacy & Development: The Challenge will directly distribute CA$14,500,000 in financial support) support to the winning innovators across the various strands of the Challenge.

How do you intend to implement this phase once winners are known?

Constance Agyeman: In Strand 1, 30 Semi-Finalists will each receive a £10,000 grant, and of those, 15 will be selected to move forward to the finalist stage and will  receive a grant of £100,000 to implement their scaling plans.

At the end of the Strand 1 finalist stage, the 15 finalists will be required to submit a detailed scaling report outlining progress against their scaling plans, together with a pitch video for evaluation by the judges against the criteria (see the link "https://afri-plastics.challenges.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/75/2021/07/Afri-Plastics-Challenge-Applicant-Handbook-v4.pdf". Applicant Handbook for more details). Three winners will be selected, the first receiving a prize of £1m, a second receiving a prize of £750,000, and a third receiving a prize of £500,000.

Diplomacy & Development: What kind of non-financial support will innovators  benefit from by participating in the Challenge?

Constance Agyeman: During the entry period, support will focus on helping to facilitate partnerships between applicants where appropriate, as well as offering application support and resources to ensure equity and inclusion for underrepresented groups of innovators.

For innovators selected to participate in the Challenge, a combination of financial and non-financial support will be provided. The non-financial support provided will cater as much as possible to the needs of the innovators, taking into account their different levels of experience, capabilities, and needs. However, there will be some core non-financial support that will be provided to all innovators. The types of non-financial support offered include:

Gender sensitivity training;

One-on-one mentoring;

Technical assistance on the plastics value chain and the circular economy;

Human-centered design (HCD), including stakeholder mapping and user testing;

Impact and M&E training;

Branding and communications;

Leadership management;

Partnerships and collaboration;

Business development;

Financial and legal support;

Investment readiness.

At the same time a series of financial grants will be provided to semi-finalists and finalists. At the end of the Challenge, financial prizes will be awarded to 3 winners (one winner for each Strand). 

This mix of financial and non-financial support aims to provide the selected innovators with the capacity to grow and develop their solutions sustainably, so that beyond the Afri-Plastics Challenge they can continue to deliver their solutions to plastic waste mismanagement.

Diplomacy & Development: Who are the partners involved in the Challenge?? 

Constance Agyeman: We have a number of partners working on the Afri-Plastics Challenge including local research providers Proportion Global (a Human-Centred Design research specialist) and Enviu (a social venture building studio focused on sustainability), AfriLabs (the largest Pan-African network of technology and innovation hubs in Africa) and Blue Globe Consulting (specializing in support to entrepreneurs, open innovation, and inducement prizes), as well as Africa Communications Media Group and Seven Consultancy, our speciality partners in communications, media, and public relations. 

Diplomacy & Development: Over 17 million tonnes of waste are generated by Sub-Saharan Africa annually, and only 12% of plastic waste is recycled.

What role does innovation play in the field of plastic waste management?

Constance Agyeman: Mismanaged waste is one of the key drivers of marine plastic pollution and the waste management systems of the region are at a crucial point in their evolution. The next decades will prove crucial in determining how well they will fare in terms of environmental performance, as well as fairness.

At the moment, the waste management systems of Sub-Saharan African countries feature waste collection from households (handled by local authorities and municipal contractors) as well as waste pickers working on an informal basis to collect plastics from residential areas and landfills, and sell them to recyclers or to intermediaries who aggregate larger volumes of waste. 

However, there are a number of limitations to improving the systems currently in place, including policy challenges, risks within the informal waste sector, limited and expensive infrastructure, and unstable prices for recycled plastics vs virgin plastics. 

Despite these barriers, the waste management space in Sub-Saharan Africa has seen several innovations in recent years. These include innovations supporting the increased collection of plastic waste (such as dedicated apps and point-based incentive systems encouraging households to sort and deposit their trash in exchange for various perks), as well as novel end-uses for plastic waste (including plastic lumber, bricks, and pavement tiles). Innovations like these need the support to scale and grow in order to support the expansion and improvement of plastic waste management systems across Sub-Saharan Africa. 

Diplomacy & Development: What do you hope to achieve through the Afri-Plastics Challenge?

Constance Agyeman: Our hope is that the Afri-Plastics Challenge provides support to enable African innovators to grow and develop their ideas, to further harness their creative thinking, and to consolidate their approach to contribute to the reduction of plastic waste across Sub-Saharan Africa, all whilst tapping into the power and potential of women and girls.

Cassien Tribunal Aungsne, Editor