makingit_18_pp40-41_good-business_print 06/05/2015 10:54 Page 40
In the latest of a series about remarkable companies, Making It talks to a young female Ugandan whose business transforms agricultural waste into fashionable bags.
Oribags Innovations In 2007, the government of Uganda banned the import, sale and manufacture of plastic bags, leaving many Ugandans striving to find appropriate alternatives. In this context, in early 2009 Rusia Orikiriza Bariho, at that time freshly graduated from university, set up a business to transform agricultural waste such as straw, elephant grass, banana fibre and cotton waste into environmentally friendly bags. The company, Oribags Innovation, quickly won plaudits and in 2010 it won the SEED Award for sustainable consumption and production recycling. (The SEED Initiative, funded by the United Nations Environmental Programme, the United Nations Development Programme and the International Union for Conservation of Nature, promotes innovative and locally led social and environmental start-ups in developing countries.) Handing over the award to Orikiriza, the British High Commissioner to Uganda, Martin Shearman, stated, “This award is recognition of your particular achievements in innovation and entrepreneurship so far, of your promising efforts to promote economic growth, social
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development and environmental protection and, not least, of the potential of your project to inspire others.”
More than making bags out of waste Oribags Innovation has its head office at the industrial park in the capital, Kampala. Oribags workers collect and/or purchase agricultural waste from local farmers and the raw material is then taken to be processed at the incubation centre at the Uganda Industrial Research Institute (UIRI). The paper-making area is also located at UIRI’s Kampala industrial incubation centre, which provides facilities to Oribags and 29 other Ugandan industrial entrepreneurs. Orikiriza explains how the paper pulp is made into a bag, “If we are making a paper bag, after drying the paper, we have to smooth it because if it just dries under the sun, the paper will be very hard and inflexible. So, we use rollers to smooth it out. After that we do the measurement according to the size required by a client. After we’ve done that, we do the printing because the bags must be personalized according to the client’s address and logo, or to have a specific trendy word that they need on the bag.”