A Kenya-based entrepreneurial partnership between TakaTaka Solutions and Chanzi Ltd – who launched a business model in response to the SMEP Programme grant funding opportunity – has contributed to the scaling of an impactful waste management business model from Kenya into Tanzania.
In April 2023, the SMEP Programme’s grant funding opportunity brought TakaTaka and Chanzi together in a partnership to implement and refine an integrated waste management pilot in Nairobi, Kenya, and to replicate this model in Mombasa.
TakaTaka Solutions is a well-established Kenyan waste management and recycling company, offering waste collection, sorting, processing, and plastics recycling and composting services. Mixed household waste and food and beverages waste is collected and trucked by TakaTaka collection services to their Lusigetti site, where it is sorted manually on conveyor-based sorting lines into plastics and organic wastes. Plastics are removed and set aside for washing and recycling in the TakaTaka plastics recycling facility. Organic waste is sorted into streams: high quality organic waste and lower quality organic waste. Of the high quality organic waste is selected for pig food and the balance is transferred to Chanzi’s Black Soldier Fly (BSF) facility (adjacent to the TakaTaka site) where it is ground to a suitable substrate for BSF larvae. Lower quality and more woody wastes high in lignocellulose are used for compost production by TakaTaka and for pyrolysis into biochar at Chanzi’s facility. Chanzi has a steady production established for biochar, frass (BSF excrement) and BSF meal. This model makes financial and operational sense and is working well in Nairobi, where Chanzi “follows” TakaTaka into every market they enter. The pair have demonstrated the ability to sustainably manage >90% of municipal waste types (including from food and beverages industries). According to the two partners, the model is a complete game changer and, to the best of our knowledge, is entirely new – it has not been implemented anywhere else in the world, until now.
Andrew Wallace of Chanzi explains “The Chanzi Partnership with TakaTaka Solutions worked so well in Nairobi that the Chanzi Group decided to replicate it in Tanzania by starting Okota.” Okota Waste (“Okota” is Swahili for ‘pick-up’) is a newly formed company based in Arusha, Tanzania. Andrew gives more context: “We realised that asking Chanzi site managers to manage BSF operations as well as handling the waste aggregation would be unrealistic – it’s two entirely different skill sets/mindsets.” Thus, Okota has been established as a waste aggregation company, sourcing, collecting and sorting (just as TakaTaka does in the Nairobi model).
Waste collection and aggregation is a relatively new business for the Chanzi Group. They have found TakaTaka’s support and operational insight invaluable in the teething period and they are tracking continuous improvements in efficiency and productivity.
Okota is intercepting over 40 waste streams in Arusha, immediately diverting recyclable waste and segregating organic wastes as feedstocks for Chanzi’s BSF and biochar production facility. The waste is diverted from going to landfill at the Muriet Municipal Waste Site which is nearing the end of its lifespan (capacity only until 2028). So, interventions to divert waste and add value are more than timeous. The Okota-Chanzi partnership is now processing >40MT/day municipal solid waste which represents 13% of the total waste going to landfill. The business is also on a growth trajectory to scale from two sorting lines to six lines, achieving a diversion of 65% of all wastes by the end of 2025. Chanzi Arusha currently converts food waste into 10MT/month of dried insect protein. Their modular, scalable approach to insect farming allows them to gradually ramp up production with the long-term goal of using insects to combat 100% of organic waste produced in the city.
There is potential for the Okota-Chanzi partnership model to operate in at least 26 town and cities in Tanzania. To date they have engaged with 11 towns who are open to both companies setting up landfill diversion and upcycling centres, and rollout is planned for Tanga, Moshi, Mbeya and Mwanza. The Okota-Chanzi model is clearly a sustainable offering that significantly eases the pressure on municipal landfill sites while also providing local social and economic benefits. In the first six months of operation (1 May 2024 to 30 October 2024), Okota recycled a total of 4,130 MT of municipal solid waste with 66 full-time jobs created in Arusha at the Okota facility.
But finance is a barrier to wider scaling – the cost to establish Okota was approximately $400,000 – and achieving the medium-term goal of expanding Chanzi and Okota to 11 more Tanzanian cities and servicing 5 million citizens, would require $12.25m additional investment. The Chanzi group is actively fundraising to attract the investment required for this expansion. The Chanzi Group’s operations are attractive to impact investors and the TakaTaka-Chanzi partnership, kickstarted through SMEP grant funding in Kenya, provides a showcase for the viability and impact of this model for such investors.
In terms of plastic recycling, Okota is aggregating all plastics wastes apart from flexible packaging, which are trucked to TakaTaka in Kenya for recycling. There is a significant demand for PET (polyethylene terephthalate) flakes in Tanzania and Kenya, and, with the assistance of TakaTaka, local markets have been secured for most of the other plastics aggregates. New solutions are also underway for problem wastes, such as a project that Okota will launch next year in Tanga to convert multi-layered plastics/tetra/milk packages into building materials for the mass market.
Sustainable and scalable business models for effective integrated waste management are pivotal for pollution mitigation. The TakaTaka-Chanzi partnership pilot project, and its scaling into Tanzania, is an excellent example of how the SMEP Programme is working to contribute towards this solution.
What drives the vision of Chanzi Ltd? It’s simple. Its founders, Sune Mushendwa and Andrew Wallace, are not only wired towards delivering profitable and scalable social enterprise models, but they are Tanzanians who love their homes and what better way to express this than through practical sustainable measures to better environmental management.
Authors: Amanda Dinan, Staci Warrington and the TakaTaka-Chanzi project team
Amanda Dinan and Staci Warrington are members of the SMEP Project Management Agent
