Support Recyclespay for 1000 children in Lagos

RECYCLESPAY EDUCATIONAL PROJECT: REBUILDING WITH THE END IN MIND

This is the thirteenth update we will be writing to you, our incredible Giving community in four years. Reminiscing on the previous twelve updates, one thing remains clear: the fight to ensure children in low-income communities are not disenfranchised has barely even started.

We write not with heavy hearts but with empty hearts and a resolve committed to ensuring at least 10,000 children get access to quality education while their environment is rid of harmful plastics littered around them.

The numbers are dire: 18.3 million children are out of school, according to recent data shared by the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF).

What we have been doing for the last four years is helping children in 15 schools across Nigeria pay their fees using recyclable waste.

Realities from the last four years have drastically changed, forcing a switch in how we deliver this project to communities. The cost of fees has gone up by over 100%, meaning the margin covered by the plastics is no longer sufficient, giving the parents of these children extra tedious work in order to meet the criteria of the number of plastics required to pay for a term of fees.

To curb this problem, we reduced our project spend, which is majorly consumed by the cost of fuel and maintenance of our vehicles:

• Reducing pick-up frequency.
• Cutting down on our reach to just schools within a single community for the next six months.
• Onboarding 12 private low-income schools that are using the plastics-for-fees program for about 2,000 pupils.
• Onboarding 45 government-owned schools with over 10,000 students who are using the proceeds from the waste-to-fees exchange program to fix, maintain, and purchase school essentials.

We recovered 785 kg of plastic waste between March 2024 to May 2024.

We believe education is the foundation upon which we build our future. We are committed to building this future and ensuring it is inclusive, equitable, and prosperous for every child, everywhere.

• Global Giving Data Report (DOCX)

RECYCLESPAY EDUCATIONAL PROJECT: ONE PLASTIC AT A TIME

The RecyclesPay Educational Project was kicked off in its infant stages as a project established from the need to ensure equitable access to an education for children living in vulnerable communities.

These children who often come from impoverished homes, mostly living with their single mothers or absent fathers, are forced at an extremely young age to fend for themselves and their family.

The project has since addressed these issues directly and indirectly by helping guardians see merit in letting their children go to school as opposed to fishing or hawking during school hours.

This has not been without its unique challenges, as at 2020, UNICEF reported that the number of out of school children in Nigeria stood at 10.5 million, that number stands at 20.2 million in 2024.

This metric, though reflective of a national failure to organise around ensuring access to schools for young people, does not reflect the individual effort being put in to prevent one child at a time from dropping out of school and helping even more get into school.

The metric is a reflection of how insecurity, poor financing and weak policy implementation have worked together to prevent progress in ensuring No Child Is Left Behind.

The project has faced its own fair share of challenges over the last few months as reported in our previous reports.

The high cost of logistics, fuel and food inflation has further driven more families to withdraw their children from school and those who are able to attend school do so while hungry, which makes learning almost impossible.

The project is movement intensive as there is a need to ensure that all the plastics and recyclables recovered by the schools are collected, and then exchanged for payment of school fees, this means we must have a truck running around all the schools where we operate.

We haven't been as mobile as we plan to due to high maintenance and operations costs, nevertheless, we have maintained the full function of the project in 12 schools, recovering 23, 266.01 kg of recyclable waste since inception, enabled through donations raised via GlobalGiving.

We also recovered 1065.9kg of plastic waste between October 2023 to February 2024.

The low recovery for this reporting period was mainly due to the school break which usually accounts for Christmas and the New year.

Your donations made this impact, little as it is, possible.

This is no doubt significant in the individual lives we have reached, opened and elevated through your help.

Our next phase of implementation will see us focus on localizing recycling efforts in the various communities we serve, this way we spend less moving around and focus on empowering these communities with the resources at our disposal.

Beyond just directly putting these children in school, we will give the people access to earn so their kids are no longer forced to drop out and help with earning an income.

Thank you for reading through this report, thank you for being here, let's do more.

One plastic at a time.

• Global Giving Data Report (DOCX)