Fifteen teams of innovators from across Sub-Saharan Africa have been named finalists in the Afri-Plastics Challenge with solutions that will change both the behaviour of individuals and communities around plastic waste.
Finalists from Botswana, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Senegal, South Africa, and Uganda will receive a £50,000 grant towards their solutions.
Three winning projects will be awarded £250 000 each in March 2023, and gamification, storytelling, and incentives-based solutions are among the key innovations.
Projects that made it to the finals include “Change at the till”, a solution developed by Botswana’s Meeticks Africa. “Change at the Till” runs a 30-day challenge that aims to get users to gain knowledge on how their use of single-use plastics, especially when shopping, negatively affects the environment and contributes heavily to marine plastic waste, and to practice what they learn. The solution is a multi-day gamified experience conducted over an intelligent WhatsApp chatbot and backend app.
Another project is a Training-Empowerment-Promotion (TEP) model developed by Catharina Natang, a Cameroonian organisation. The TEP model aims to provide training on sustainable fashion and resource mobilisation to fashion designers and equip local designers to understand the subtle but massive presence of plastic-based fabrics in the fashion industry, and how this contributes to the global plastic waste problem.
Related
Related content you may like
