{"id":3564,"date":"2019-07-04T09:08:42","date_gmt":"2019-07-04T09:08:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/africasustainabilitymatters.com\/?p=3564"},"modified":"2026-01-11T05:30:23","modified_gmt":"2026-01-11T05:30:23","slug":"the-school-where-parents-pay-tuition-fees-with-plastic-bottles","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rayscohosting.best\/ASM\/2019\/07\/04\/the-school-where-parents-pay-tuition-fees-with-plastic-bottles\/","title":{"rendered":"The School Where Parents Pay Tuition Fees With Plastic Bottles"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

By Valentine Iwenwanne and Aisha Salaudeen, for CNN<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

As a petty trader earning a pittance from\ntrading car engine oil at bustling Ajegunle market in Nigeria’s economic\ncapital, Lagos, Oluwaseyi does not earn enough to cover her daughter\u2019s the\nannual 18,000 naira (around $50) school fees.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Whenever a new session is about to\ncommence, sometimes we get worried when there is no money, coupled with the\nchallenges of taking care of the home,” Oluwaseyi told CNN.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

 However, thanks to a recent partnership\nwith Africa Cleanup\nInitiative (ACI)<\/a>, an NGO with focus on sustainability, Oluwaseyi’s daughter’s\nschool, Morit International School, now accepts the plastic bottles, also known\nas PET bottles, in exchange for school fees.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Through a program called RecyclesPay, ACI\ncollaborates with schools in low-income communities to allow parents who are\nunable to afford fees for their children to pay using plastic bottles they\ncollect.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Twice a month Oluwaseyi visits her daughter’s\nschool with bags full of sorted plastic bottle recyclables.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The cost of tuition is determined by how many\nPET bottles she has collected; for every 200 kilograms of recyclable bottles,\nOluwaseyi can earn up to \u20a64,000 (about $11) off the term’s tuition of \u20a67500\n(about $24).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

 Bottles\ncollected from parents are sorted and compressed by Wecyclers<\/a>, a social enterprise\nin Nigeria with a focus on waste collection.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

ACI partnered with them to ensure that all PET\nbottles are converted to reusable materials.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There are more than 450,000 <\/a>megatons of plastic waste discarded in Lagos\nwaters every year, according to reports in local\nmedia.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nigeria generates huge amounts of plastic\nwaste, and according to 2017 Ocean Atlas\nreport<\/a>, Nigeria is ranked\nnumber 11 in the world for plastic pollution, posing health risks to citizens\nand causing environmental damage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Alexander Akhigbe, founder of ACI, says\nthrough the RecyclesPay scheme he is providing solutions to Nigeria’s\nenvironmental and climate issues.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So far, ACI has run its projects in five\nschools in Lagos and has reached more than 1,000 school children, he says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“We are working on the deplorable state\nof the Nigerian environment and on the other hand improve education by using\nplastic bottles to substitute tuition fees so as to encourage parents to send\ntheir children to school and then save more money to fix other challenges at\nhome,” Akhigbe told CNN.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nigeria has been tagged the poverty\ncapital<\/a> of the world,\nwith 87 million Nigerians, around half of the country’s population, living on\nless than $1.90 per day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As a result, the country has an alarming rate\nof out of school children —10.5 million, <\/a>the highest in the world, according to Unicef.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Akhigbe, 42, says he hopes to help reduce this\nnumber while also encouraging proper disposal of plastic. Read the original Article<\/a> on CNN<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Valentine Iwenwanne and Aisha Salaudeen, for CNN As a petty trader earning a pittance from trading car engine oil at bustling Ajegunle market in Nigeria’s economic capital, Lagos, Oluwaseyi…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":3565,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"content-type":"","pagelayer_contact_templates":[],"_pagelayer_content":"","_lmt_disableupdate":"","_lmt_disable":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[101],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3564","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-international-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rayscohosting.best\/ASM\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3564","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rayscohosting.best\/ASM\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rayscohosting.best\/ASM\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rayscohosting.best\/ASM\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rayscohosting.best\/ASM\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3564"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rayscohosting.best\/ASM\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3564\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rayscohosting.best\/ASM\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3565"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rayscohosting.best\/ASM\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3564"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rayscohosting.best\/ASM\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3564"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rayscohosting.best\/ASM\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3564"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}