Starting as a way of dealing with the inconvenience that came with emptying his dustbin, Green Campus GH has grown into an entity that is helping in the fight against the sanitation through the use of trash bags.
Papa Yaw Agyekum is a student of the University of Ghana and the CEO of Green Campus Gh which is an organization that seeks to improve sanitation by advocating proper waste management through the distribution and sales of trash bags. Here’s what the CEO of the organization Papa Agyekum had to say.
Kuulpeeps:How did you get your idea for the business?
Green Campus Gh: So it is basically simple, it was out of inconvenience and necessity. Noticing a problem and having the will to solve it and making a business out of it. Basically, i was as in school and I had to empty my trash one day. You know in school, boys don’t like to empty their rubbish, they will probably wait in the evening to empty them so that the girls will not see them. It happened to me and everybody. When I went to empty my dustbin I realised organic was stuck in my dustbin and I didn’t want to ever wash my dustbin so i decided to come out with a plan and that was to get a trash bag and instead of using it alone, we began to distribute to people on my floor because of the kind of menace we had with waste.
Kuulpeeps: What was your mission on the onset?
Green Campus Gh: My mission on the onset was to improve sanitation in Ghana. We wanted to serve as a waste embassy in Ghana. Management and improving waste.
Kuulpeeps: How many employees do you have?
Green Campus Gh: We have the CEO which is me, team heads and 12 department to help sustain the business because it’s more of an entrepreneurial business and an NGO and we have a general group of all team members and we are all representing as Ambassadors for now to grow the company So we have 92 members including all team heads.
Kuulpeeps: What services do you provide?
Green Campus Gh: We have services we provide now and what we intend to provide. For the services we are providing now, we are distributing the trash bag and selling them on a large scale and we have done our first production and sold over ten thousand pieces so far. That is the first phase, we want to do the distribution and sale of these bags and create awareness. The second phase is the collection of waste and assortment of waste. The assortment will be very easy due to the tool we have provided. The final part will be the recycling. Then the cycle will continue.
Kuulpeeps: How do you advertise your business?
Green Campus Gh: We started by word of the mouth and gradually we moved on to social media. We put together photographs carrying the message we wanted to put across. We put together mass images on social media. We also had the opportunity to do some radio interviews with radio univers and citifmonline.com.
Kuulpeeps: Has your business been a success and if it has what do you owe this success to?
Green Campus: Firstly, I will say my business is a growing success story, I cannot pound my chest and say it is successful yet. The reason why I say that we are a growing success story is because of the wonderful people i work with. What do I owe this growing success to? First to God then my father, Mr. Kofi Addo Agyekum and my mother Mrs. Gifty Asante who have been extraordinary and supported me to stand firm in making business decisions and the angel donor that pre financed our business.
Kuulpeeps: What are your company goals?
Green Campus Gh: The specific goal and vision is one, to be a waste management embassy in Ghana.
Kuulpeeps: What is unique about you company?
Green Campus Gh: The unique part of our business is the products that we sell. We have this mantra, ‘quality or nothing’ and what we intend doing is providing quality to the client and creating a cool feeling when managing it. When it comes to our trash bags, they are not produce from polythene bags they are produced from specially chosen materials that can be induced to bring about biodegradability. They are leakproof and can carry both solid and liquid waste. They come in three colours white, blue and green which will make the waste assortment easier when we start in the future.
