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Rising Tide Africa (RTA), the women-led pan-African angel investment network, has committed up to ₦1.4 billion ($1 million) to Ororo Waste Management Limited (Ororo Waste), Lagos State’s partner for institutional-scale used cooking oil (UCO) collection and export.
Ororo Waste received the first tranche of the corporate note on September 16, 2026, and further tranches may be funded through December 16 to support additional collection infrastructure and working capital.
In July, Ororo Waste, alongside the Lagos State Environmental Protection Agency (LASEPA), Shell Foundation and the Waste Pickers Association of Nigeria (WAPAN), trained roughly 250 market women, waste pickers and youths at the Lagos Chamber of Commerce and Industry in Alausa, Ikeja.
The two-day programme, the first of many planned over the next few years, covered safe collection, handling and storage of used cooking oil, quality assurance and traceability, and the oil’s value as feedstock for Sustainable Aviation Fuel and biodiesel, and how participants would be paid for every quantity of oil they supplied through the network.
Olaitan Dawodu, Ororo Waste’s director of operations, stated at the July training, “Every participant within the supply chain, including market women, waste pickers and youths, will earn income for their respective roles. This creates an inclusive circular economy that generates employment while protecting human health and the environment.”
Nigeria produces an estimated 840,000 metric tons of used cooking oil a year; more than 95% currently goes uncaptured.
Used oil discarded into drains and waterways can contribute to blockages and worsen local flooding; some is unsafely reused (with material carcinogenic impact) in food preparation. Under the European Union’s revised Renewable Energy Directive (RED III), member states must by 2030 meet either a 29% renewable-energy share in transport or a 14.5% reduction in transport-fuel greenhouse-gas intensity. The policy supports demand for certified waste-based feedstocks.
Ororo has built the infrastructure to capture that supply. The company holds ISCC certification, has exported thousands of metric tons with zero quality rejections, and has five years of operational history collecting used cooking oil from businesses and, since March, households and markets. It supplies an expanding cohort of tier one offtakers.
The Ororo Waste collection platform tracks every transaction by GPS and QR code from collector to export container and pays collectors by mobile money the same day.
“Nigeria generates hundreds of thousands of tonnes of used cooking oil each year. Market women and waste pickers already do most of the collecting. Few have ever been paid fairly for that work, and even fewer at scale. Our capital helps fund the infrastructure that pays those women the same day, for a commodity that some of the world’s largest offtakers are already contracted to buy. This is gender-lens investing in practice: capital that follows the value women are already creating and helping them grow it,” said Yemi Keri, co-founder of Rising Tide Africa.
“Refiners in Europe don’t buy good intentions – they buy documented, ISCC-certified tonnes. Every litre we export is GPS-tracked and QR-coded from a collector’s drum to the export container, which is why we have built very committed relationships based on trust and reliability with the offtaker community, and why we’ve had zero quality rejections across thousands of tonnes exported. Rising Tide’s capital helps fund the unglamorous but necessary part — drums, trucks, hub storage, and the working-capital float that lets us pay a market woman in Alausa the same day she sells to us. We are very honoured to be in a position to deploy infrastructure that will offer dignified incomes to several hundred thousand women, at a minimum,” said Ayo Banjo, Co-CEO of Ororo Waste Management Ltd.
The investment gives Rising Tide Africa exposure to Ororo’s expansion from three collection hubs — Lagos, Abuja and Port Harcourt — toward a target of more than 40 hubs nationally over the next five years. Proceeds will fund hub infrastructure, feedstock purchases from the collector network and hub operating costs.
As part of the partnership, Ororo Waste and Rising Tide Africa have preliminarily agreed on an indicative LOI-framed set of five-year development impact targets, to be baselined this year and tracked and reported annually. These include growing Ororo Waste’s formally paid collector network from roughly 5,000 today to more than 200,000 by 2031, with women expected to represent at least half (and possibly up to three-quarters) of newly onboarded market-level collection points; scaling certified UCO collection from a few thousand metric tons exported to date toward more than 150,000 metric tons a year by 2031, equivalent to roughly 18% of Nigeria’s total estimated annual UCO volume; and expanding from three collection hubs to more than 40 nationally.
Ororo Waste expects to complete a baseline income survey of its first formally onboarded collector cohort from the July 2026 training by the end of this year, and intends to report annual income and employment outcomes for participating women, waste pickers and youths, alongside workforce and leadership gender composition, as part of its ESG and impact reporting, in a manner consistent with recognized gender-lens investing frameworks such as the 2X Global Criteria.
Ororo Waste has adopted a governance and ESG framework consistent with the expectations of institutional and development finance investors, including engagement of a top-tier external auditor and counsel, the appointment of independent directors, and regular ESG and impact reporting.
The Company’s ESG Policy is aligned with the UN Sustainable Development Goals, the guidelines of Nigeria’s National Environmental Standards and Regulations Enforcement Agency (NESREA), and the Nigerian Code of Corporate Governance 2018, and commits Ororo Waste to “fair employment practices and gender equality in recruitment and promotion.”
