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Tanzanian company sees opportunity in waste management

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Tanzania-based Phenix Recycling is a bespoke waste management and recycling service for businesses in eastern and southern Africa. Athina Kyriakopoulou, founder and CEO, spoke with Justin Probyn, author of this report.

1. Give us your elevator pitch.

Businesses across the East Africa region are struggling with the issue of how to responsibly manage their waste. At the same time, local innovative startups using waste as a resource are lacking reliable and predictable access to their waste. Phenix Recycling is connecting the two, creating an “uninterrupted power supply” for waste and enabling a circular economy across geographies, industries and sectors.

2. How did you finance your startup?

To date, Phenix has been funded solely by founder capital of around US$50,000. This gave us a two-year runway in which we piloted three versions of our business model, and successfully serviced clients across two countries and two industries.

3. If you were given US$1m to invest in your company now, where would it go?

That investment would be spent on purchasing new equipment and setting up long-term hubs in two of our main locations. This includes machinery and items that would allow us to work more efficiently and reduce the upstream cost of our services by making our processed material more valuable downstream.

Read also: Tanzania, Uganda deepen economic ties with deal for supply of gas

4. What risks does your business face?

Phenix is one of the first of its kind therefore at the forefront of a new formal industry. This means that we are competing with informal sectors while trying to build the awareness around the need for our services. Navigating the regulatory environment is also a challenge as we have an innovative businesses model that is not fully regulated yet.

5. So far, what has proven to be the most successful form of marketing?

By far the best form of marketing is word of mouth through business networks. As a new company and trying to build a new industry, happy and satisfied business customers are the key to acquiring new customers. Particularly in established industries like tourism, where businesses tend to follow the pack. Once you have your foot in the door by satisfying a few key leaders in their field, the rest will follow and it won’t be long until its “industry standard”.

6. Describe your most exciting entrepreneurial moment.

When I received my first revenue. Running a B2B business is drastically different from B2C, in that clients take a lot longer to acquire, sometimes over eight months; particularly your first clients. So when I had my first paying client, it was a huge success and milestone.

7. Tell us about your biggest mistake, and what have you’ve learnt from it?

I think my biggest mistake was making operational investments into teams and facilities before having the customers signed and sealed. No matter how promising a customer is, they aren’t a customer until pen touches paper. Also, during the validation phase, a customer who signs up with a huge discount, does not validate willingness nor the ability to pay for the service. You need customers who pay full price to prove your model.

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No plan to increase taxes, Nigeria’s revenue chief says

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The head of Nigeria’s revenue agency, Zacch Adedeji, has reaffirmed that there is no plan for the introduction of new taxes in the country.

Adedeji, who is the Chairman of the Federal Inland Revenue, made the position known when the Chief Executive Officer of Guinness Nigeria Plc, Adebayo Alli, led the management team of the company on a visit to the Revenue House in Abuja.

He was quoted as saying, “the President gave a directive that he wants a single digit tax in the country, meaning that the maximum number of taxes we will have after the work of the Presidential Committee on Fiscal Policy and Tax Reforms will be nine taxes,” in a statement signed by the Special Adviser on Media to the FIRS chairman, Dare Adekanmbi.

“For us at FIRS, we have responded to that directive. We want to grow the pie such that even if we are taking the same percentage of the bigger pie, the result will be huge.

“By God’s grace, we will not introduce additional taxes nor increase any form of tax. We are only determined to increase the pie. We have restructured our operations at FIRS in such a way that we are now effectively carrying out our duty of assessing, collecting and accounting for taxes. We used to have functional types of taxes, but we have identified that the only customers we have are the taxpayers.”

He stated that by restructuring “our operations based on our customers, using their turnover as the basis to categorise them into large, medium, and small,” FIRS has enhanced its customer relations. He continued by saying that President Bola Tinubu wanted to increase Nigerians’ purchasing power in order to promote growth and increase businesses’ capacity for productivity through the recently implemented consumer credit scheme.

The Nigerian government has been working to overhaul the nation’s monetary and fiscal policies since the start of the Bola Tinubu administration. This has resulted in the central bank and the Oyedele-led tax advisory council implementing daring new policies.

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Nigeria’s central bank raises interest rate to 24.75% amid soaring inflation

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Governor Olayemi Cardoso of Nigeria’s central bank has announced that the bank has increased its monetary policy rate by 200 basis points, to 24.75% from 22.75%, as part of its ongoing tightening measures to combat skyrocketing inflation.

This comes after the bank boosted rates by 4 percentage points last month in an attempt to contain pricing pressures, marking the highest rate hike in almost 17 years.

The committee did not convene under Cardoso’s leadership until February, thus this decision was only the second since he entered office in September of last year.

In the aftermath of the removal of subsidies on petrol products in May last year, Nigeria’s economy is experiencing a cost of living crisis that has left millions of people struggling to satisfy their basic requirements. Annual inflation is above 30%, the worst level in nearly three decades.

At a press conference, Cardoso stated that while members of the Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) were still certain that the tightening cycle was necessary to control inflation, they also believed that price pressures had started to ease as of May.

“Considerations of the committee at this meeting focused on the current inflationary pressures and the need to anchor inflation expectations as well as ensure sustained exchange rate stability,” he said.

The value of the naira appreciated by 12% by the end of last week’s trading activities, and has been on the rise so far this week also, exchanging lower than 1,400 per $ on Tuesday.

Recent measures like the removal of subsidies and the double depreciation of the naira have been defended by the government as necessary to boost economic growth and draw in investment, but they have incited public ire and, in some cases, desperation.

More tightening is anticipated in the upcoming two MPC meetings, according to David Omojomolo, Africa economist at Capital Economics, before policymakers back off and maintain stable interest rates.

“We expect Governor Cardoso’s desire to bring the inflation crisis to a close and also strengthen the naira will lead to more tightening,” said Omojomolo.

Following the increase, Nigeria’s sovereign foreign dollar bonds saw an increase. Tradeweb data shows that the 2029 note saw the biggest jump, rising 1.4 cents against the dollar to 97.9 cents at 1344 GMT, its highest level in over two years.

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