On a not too significant day in 2009, environmental consultant Achenyo Idachaba was driving on one of the many bridges in Lagos. She looked out to the water she was crossing over, not expecting to find anything particularly interesting. What she saw changed her life.
Carpeting the waterbody was a green mass, dominating the liquid space on which it sat, and obscuring the water from view. The thing, which was, in fact, a colony of water weed, had hemmed in a boat. It had been constituted into a visual barrier, which was also hindering the smooth progress of water-faring vessels.
The weeds were water hyacinths.
The light bulb moment
Today, Idachaba points to that moment on the bridge as the spark that ignited what has now become her life’s passion.
“To me, the image [I saw] represented several things,” she said, in an interview with the BBC. “The problem; and also an opportunity. I decided to look at it from the opportunity standpoint.”
Water Hyacinths aren’t intrinsically evil. In fact, they can fit perfectly into gardens, where their pink flowers could provide extra aesthetic value. But as occupants of lagoon surfaces, they are a formidable menace, blocking off fishermen’s boats and making water transportation difficult. Humans aren’t the only ones that suffer from the weed’s lightning speed sweep over rivers and streams; water hyacinths also suck up nutrients from the water, leaving the fishes in them with very little. As a result, fish stocks fall, and fishermen have less fish to sell and make money from. Incomes plummet.
But for Iwachaba, the hyacinths could do more than just stifle the economies of rural communities. She decided that they could be converted from an environmental problem into a solution that benefited the districts they were invading.
In 2011, Idachaba founded
MitiMeth, a social enterprise which transforms problematic water weeds like the water hyacinths into useful, commercially valuable products.
One woman’s road to entrepreneurship
Achenyo Idachaba was born in the United States to Nigerian parents. Although she visited Nigeria when she was younger, she lived most of her early life in America, where she was educated and worked as a business analyst. But she longed to return to the country she called her real home.
In 2009, she left a successful career in the United States’ oil industry and headed for Nigeria, where she began an environmental consultancy. Two years later, her concern turned fully to weeds and agro waste.
“I’ve always wanted to come up with solutions that would help people that were less privileged”, she said in a recent radio discussion forum. She explains that this concern eventually narrowed down to environmental issues while she worked in the oil industry.
Idachaba came to know about the possible beneficial uses of water hyacinth through research she conducted. It turned out that communities in South East Asia were processing the weed and making it into things that they could sell. She subsequently took some lessons in handcraft from a local weaver and acquired the skill she needed to create marketable products out of plant fibre.
She started up with her savings and entered business plan competitions, hoping to win funding for her project. Then she won a grant from the Federal Government (through the
YouWin program) and went on to recruit staff and expand the business.
Creating opportunities from weeds and waste
MitiMeth’s primary activity is creating handcrafted products from aquatic weeds such as water hyacinth and Typha grass, and agricultural waste materials like banana barks and rice husks. Its products range from stationery and dining ware to hand baskets and furniture. These items are sold through third-party retail outlets and via an online web store. The startup also trains local people in riverine communities to harvest, process and make saleable products from the water hyacinths that have infested their waterways.
MitiMeth generates its revenue from its handcraft products and its training workshops, which Idachaba says are funded by companies looking to encourage sustainable projects as a way of attending to their corporate social responsibility.
When life gives you water hyacinths…
Idachaba’s work with MitiMeth has received extensive coverage from international media, including the BBC and CNN. A 7 minute long
TED Talk video in which she narrates the story of her founding and running MitiMeth, has been viewed over a million times. In 2014, she won the Cartier Women’s Initiative Award for sub-Saharan Africa.
When asked about the qualities that made her venture a success, Idachaba points to a familiar, yet crucial entrepreneurial attribute: Conviction.
“You have to be a person of deep conviction. You [should] believe in what you have to offer, come what may.”
She calls her foray into social entrepreneurship a “leap of faith, which came out of a conviction that there was a lot of work to do.”
That work- turning a major economic nuisance into fodder for economic empowerment -is what she is passionately pursuing.
Featured Image Credit: Ted.com
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This article was first published on 9th October 2017
ikenna-nwachukwu
Ikenna Nwachukwu holds a bachelor's degree in Economics from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. He loves to look at the world through multiple lenses- economic, political, religious and philosophical- and to write about what he observes in a witty, yet reflective style.
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