Bilikiss Adebiyi-Abiola was an IBM software engineer, developing social networking software that was used by thousands, primarily at Fortune 500 companies. But, she had this nagging feeling that it was time to do something that would directly impact her native country, Nigeria.
Determined to fix the urban waste management system in Nigeria, she received a Legatum Fellowship, and then met and partnered with Alex Fallon, a fellow student. Together, they came up with the perfect idea: Wecyclers, a crowd-sourced recycling platform built around bikes welded to trailers (what the company calls cargo bikes) operating in Lagos, Nigeria. Wecyclers aims to give low-income communities a chance to extract value from waste and clean up their neighborhoods via incentive-based recycling. After all, only 40 percent of the city’s garbage from more than 18 million people is collected by Lagos’s municipal government. And, of that, a mere 13 percent of recyclable materials are salvaged from landfills.
Wecyclers has set out to change those alarming numbers and since its inception has received funding from MIT Public Service Center (PSC), the MIT $100K ACCELERATE Contest and the Carroll L. Wilson Award.