Nigeria’s women engineers urged to unlock coastal communities’ waste economy

A Nigerian entrepreneur who turns invasive water weeds into furniture has called on the country’s top professional women engineers to put their expertise behind a growing grassroots waste economy — or risk letting a generational opportunity slip away.

Achenyo Idachaba-Obaro, founder of Mitimeth, delivered that challenge in Lagos at the seventh edition of the Olutumbi Maduka Annual Lecture (OMAL), urging the Association of Professional Women Engineers of Nigeria (APWEN) to mentor coastal communities and young innovators on building commercially viable businesses from waste.

“Mentorship and engineering support can help transform grassroots ideas into commercially viable solutions capable of driving economic growth and environmental restoration,” she told the gathering, assembled to mark the 85th birthday of APWEN’s founder, Olutumbi Maduka.

Idachaba-Obaro’s pitch was grounded in her own company’s model. Mitimeth harvests water hyacinth — an invasive aquatic plant choking Nigeria’s waterways — and converts it into furniture, lighting, home décor and speciality paper, drawing local community members into the production chain.

She widened the lens to the continent, pointing to entrepreneurs in Egypt, Kenya, South Africa and Nigeria already turning plastic waste, agricultural residue, textile scraps and invasive species into exportable products and manufacturing jobs.

But she identified a critical bottleneck: technology. Manual, outdated processing systems, she argued, are capping productivity, undermining quality control and keeping young people out of the sector. Without engineering intervention in machinery adaptation, biomaterial processing and scalable production, African waste enterprises cannot compete globally.

That, she said, is precisely where APWEN’s 8,000-plus professional members come in.

The lecture’s theme, “Waste to Wealth Revolution: Women Leading Africa’s Sustainable Enterprises” landed against a backdrop of mounting pressure on African economies to develop climate-aligned industries.

NSE President, Ali Rabiu, represented at the event, called the theme a direct response to “rising environmental and economic challenges,” framing waste valorisation not as a niche green cause but as mainstream economic policy.

APWEN President Chinyere Igwegbe reinforced that framing, pointing to association-linked projects already converting plastics, cassava peels, landfill gas and water hyacinth into marketable products as proof of concept.

The choice of venue and occasion added weight to the call. Olutumbi Maduka placed a newspaper advertisement in 1982, inviting Nigeria’s female engineers to unite — at a time when the profession was almost entirely male. Six women answered. That group became APWEN, which today counts thousands of members and fellows.

Maduka went on to become the first female Fellow and first female Vice-President of the Nigerian Society of Engineers.

It is against that founding story of turning marginal positions into institutional power that Idachaba-Obaro’s argument carries its sharpest edge: the same ingenuity that built a professional association from six members can build a waste economy from discarded hyacinth.

The question she left with the room is whether Nigeria’s women engineers will now apply that same energy to the waterways, landfills and farmlands waiting at their doorstep.