Kubik prides itself on its groundbreaking, climate-friendly technology that recycles one of the world’s environmental curses – plastic waste – into building blocks. But for the award-winning Ethiopian startup, it hasn’t been easy to get off the ground. It has fought tooth and nail to raise funds, says its youthful boss.
Kubik takes bundles of discarded plastic and sorts them into piles. Selected plastics are mixed, melted, and combined with additives, then molded into the desired shape. The result: black beams and interlocking blocks that are today being assembled in a pilot project – the construction of a daycare center in the capital Addis Ababa.
The construction site has no cranes or cement mixer, just a concrete floor where four workers are building a wall by fitting the blocks together like Lego and tapping them with a hammer to ensure they fit well. There is no glue or cement. The beams, screwed together on all four sides of the walls, hold the structure upright.
“The idea is that it should be super simple,” says supervisor Hayat Hassen Bedane, a 34-year-old civil engineer. “You have a manual, and the whole point is to get it done with inexperienced workers, obviously under supervision. You can build 50 square meters of a building in just five days, so it’s super fast compared to other forms of construction,” she said. “We’ve done tests, tensile stress tests, and compression tests, so it’s durable and very strong.”
Speed and smart use of unwanted plastic are not the only advantages. Recycling generates just one-fifth of the carbon released in cement production. If Kubik’s factory processes 45 tons of dumped plastic daily, it equates to avoiding 100,000 tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) annually, the company says.
There’s also a social trickle-down, giving a boost to the country’s many informal waste collectors, many of whom are women. – Funding challenge – But Kubik’s CEO, Kidus Asfaw, 36, said he struggled to get startup money for his company. He faced many setbacks from wary investors, he said, before getting a break. He has just closed a multi-million-dollar funding round to scale up production – a success coinciding with the prestigious AfricaTech prize for the company, boosting visibility.
The Ethiopian previously worked at Google, the World Bank, and UNICEF after studying in the United States. He then took the plunge into entrepreneurship, he said. “There’s a huge network that I already had within my professional environment that I could leverage in the beginning,” he told AFP in Paris last month, where he went to collect the prize. Still, “the fact that it was there didn’t make it easier” to raise money. “I’ve met over 600 people in two years. Of those 600 people, about 20 have become investors.”
Startups in Africa face numerous hurdles, from regulations and a lack of infrastructure to a fragmented continental market. But funding is a persistent and major issue on a continent that lacks fearless individual investors to provide backing. “There are very few ‘business angels’ in Africa,” said Sergio Pimenta, vice-president for Africa at the International Finance Corporation (IFC), the private sector arm of the World Bank that has just launched a $180 million fund to help provide a financing source. Of the $415 billion in venture capital deployed worldwide, just over one percent – $5.4 billion – goes to Africa, he said. And of that amount, 80 percent goes to just four countries: South Africa, Kenya, Nigeria, and Egypt.
- ‘Bias’ –
Henry Mascot, CEO and founder of the Nigerian insurance startup Curacel, co-winner of the AfricaTech prize, said he first tried to raise capital a few years ago. Africa’s problem, he said, is that Western investors have a “preference” for the unknown. “They invest in familiarity. They invest with the guy they play golf with or the guy they have a drink with every month. So how do I become that guy? Unless a lot of these investors spend time on the continent, it will be hard. It’s all about familiarity; Africa needs to be demystified because right now it’s a mystery.”
Fabrice Aime Takoumbo, a Cameroonian entrepreneur who co-founded Cinaf, a streaming platform with only African content, said non-African investors are often put off by stories of fraud or corruption. Without timely funding, many African startups have gone bust, he warned. “You start with great ideas… that fizzle out over time as you realize you don’t have the resources,” he said. “Some people just give up.”
HESPRESS English – Morocco News
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