Great Entrepreneurs is the British Council Senegal televised competition that aims at encouraging the youth to start thinking innovatively and entrepreneurially. It rewards ideas that have business-related value. This initiative was in line with the British Council skills for social entrepreneurship programme aiming at building a strong and prosperous youth in Senegal while contributing to a more secure and stable society.
This year’s winner of the competition, Amy Mbengue, is now on an immersion trip in the UK where she is meeting people from the business environment. Her project called Ecobag consists in transforming used plastics into semi-finished products. She takes used hard plastics such as plastic chairs, bowls, buckets, tanks and transforms them into semi-finished products that can be sold to plastic industries in Senegal to be recycled into new products. Ecobag wishes in a near future to be able to provide recycled finished goods made out of plastics to her clients.
Among the people that Amy met, is Nick Cliffe,Marketing manager at Closed Loop Reycling, a mixed plastic bottle recycler. The company was initially the dream of one person and its east London plants were created in 2008 after the cohesive and extensive business case he presented received some seed funding from a UK government body and investment funds. Closed Loop currently recycles around 55,000 tons of mixed plastic bottles each year. Follow Amy Mbengue's UK experience on Facebook.