In Lagos, furniture maker Joy and fashion entrepreneur Yetunde have forged a partnership to take offcuts from Yetunde’s dresses and turn them into upholstery for sustainable furniture. Rita Abiodun on an inspiring collaboration that grew out of an Oxfam Novib programme to support small businesses in Nigeria.
“We recovered 320 yards of fabrics from… waste that we would have thrown away, and I was like, this is gold. I went ahead to create bags, souvenir kits, unique and stylish jackets, and jumpsuits – and now, upholstery for furniture covering.”
Lagos-based fashion producer Yetunde Akande is describing how she has been putting the waste fabric from the dresses she makes to good use, after learning about circular business models in training with local Oxfam partner, the Enterprise Development Centre.
And it was at networking sessions for participants in Oxfam business support programmes that she first met and forged her partnership with Joy Shittu-Igbodike of Jaebee furniture. That meeting ultimately led the pair to create the Ajoke series of stylish and distinctly African furniture upholstered using fashion waste, a partnership that has seen them dubbed the “circularity queens”.
“During one of the learning events that Oxfam organised for alumni of the impact SME Development programme that Yetunde and I participated in at different times, we started a casual conversation of how we can make the most of the fabrics she is recovering. One thing led to the other, and the Ajoke series was born. These truly African furniture pieces are upholstered from the recovered fabrics from Yetunde’s business,” Joy says.
Supporting impact-driven businesses
Joy is referring to Oxfam Novib’s iSME development programme, which supported 370 impact-driven small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in Egypt, Nigeria, Pakistan, Somaliland, Uganda, and Vietnam from 2015 to 2021
One of the components of the business development services that Oxfam provides through our partners in Africa and Asia is practical ways to adopt circularity, a business model that supports small and medium enterprises (SMEs) to create products that can be used again and again – instead of making things that are used once – to reduce waste and be kinder to the environment.
Yetunde is the founder of Yetroselane, a fashion hub that creates ready-to-wear designs for women in Lagos. Like many fashion firms, her company produces lots of waste from pieces of fabric cut to make dresses. Reports have found that millions of tonnes of such fabrics end up in landfill sites every year. Though she was concerned about waste, Yetunde did not quite know how to minimise it until she went through the training.
“I had been working with fabrics for years and we generate lots of waste. The first class I attended during the business development training I had with Oxfam, the instructor enlightened us on circularity business models and that resulted in a mind shift for me.”
Within eight weeks of starting on a circular business model, she had recovered over 300 yards of fabric that could be reused, giving her the materials she needed for her new partnership.
How circularity is much more than just recycling
Joy is keen to stress how circularity is about much more than recycling. Rather than simply processing a product at the end of its life (such as melting down old metal), circularity mean reusing and refurbishing, adding value by making creative use of the product to give it new life and selling it – which is exactly what happens when you take dress fabric and use it as a decorative cover for a chair.
“A lot of people confuse circularity with recycling,” Joy says. “Circular economy runs in a cycle with a lot of value chain. You can remake, you can refurbish, you can reuse and then you can also recycle.”
In fact, giving the product potential for another lease of life in the future is part of the design process. “Some questions that we ask right from the design of our products are: after we sell this furniture piece, can we refurbish [in] years to come when our customers want to swap? Can we convert it into another usable product? Are our resources regenerative?” Joy explains.
Author
Find out more about the ISME Programme. And read the impact analysis report about the programme here. This blog is adapted from a post on the Oxfam Novib website.