Support Recyclespay for 1000 children in Lagos

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)

From Plastics To School Fees: Why 20 million out of school children need to be educated.

No country has ever been successful without a successful education system.
It's 2023 and the number of out of school children has not only risen but increasing risks as a result of climate change have completely ruled out the opportunity a few millions have of accessing schools in their local communities.

Human mobility influenced by climate change has forced millions of children to leave familiar environments for uncertain grounds.

The Recycles Pay Educational Project is designed to give every child everywhere equal opportunity to learn and thrive, while addressing human induced climate change.

"Educate the masses, elevate their standard of intelligence, and you will certainly have a successful nation."

These are not just mere words from Alexander Graham Bell, but action pillars of the Recycles Pay project.

The big question is, why are the numbers still rising?

No doubt, awareness and action especially on the Recycles Pay project has gained momentum compared to previous years, but commitments to financing have been poor.

With inflation numbers at over 26% in Nigeria, these translate not just to mere words on paper but an increase in goods and essential services - as the Recycles Pay project heavily involves mobility to pick up plastics from schools in different locations for the waste to value exchange to take place, this has proven extremely difficult with the rising costs of fuel and vehicle maintenance.

This has drastically reduced our ability to cover as many schools as we started with. We were able to collect 1,487kg of plastics between the months of July and October, 2023.
This is not to say we are relenting on our efforts but to recommit to the goal of ensuring every child has equitable access to a learning environment by 2030.

This is where YOU come in. Be the Recycles Pay cheerleader, be a NOISE MAKER, donate, partner - let's take it one child at a time, one plastic at a time.

• GlobalGiving_Data_for_October__2023African_Clean_Up_Initaitive.docx (DOCX)