Rising Tide Africa backs used cooking oil firm Ororo Waste with $1 million

Rising Tide Africa, a women-led pan-African angel investment network, has committed up to ₦1.4 billion ($1 million) to Ororo Waste Management Limited, a Lagos-based used cooking oil (UCO) waste management company, to expand its collection infrastructure and working capital.

Ororo Waste, Lagos State’s partner for institutional-scale UCO collection and export, received the first allocation on September 16, with additional funding potentially available through December 16. The new capital will finance the purchase of used cooking oil from its collector network and cover hub operating costs.

The investment comes as Ororo Waste attempts to scale a business around Nigeria’s used cooking oil waste stream. Nigeria consumes an estimated 1 million tons of vegetable oil and produces about 1.4 million metric tonnes of palm oil annually. However, there is little formal infrastructure to collect and recover used cooking oil after it is discarded, leaving much of the waste stream uncaptured.

Ororo is betting that the oil Nigerians treat as waste can become valuable for global biofuel markets and generate income for the people who collect it.

“Refiners in Europe don’t buy good intentions—they buy documented, ISCC-certified tonnes,” Ayo Banjo, co-chief executive officer (CEO) of Ororo Waste, said in a statement. “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.”

Founded in 2021, Ororo Waste builds the infrastructure to collect and export used cooking oil. The company is certified under the International Sustainability and Carbon Certification (ISCC) system as a collector and exporter of used cooking oil from households, markets, restaurants and other institutional generators. The company says its collection platform uses Global Positioning System (GPS) and quick response (QR) codes to track oil from the collector to the export container.

Ororo Waste said the new capital will finance its expansion beyond its three existing collection hubs in Lagos, Abuja and Port Harcourt to more than 40 hubs across Nigeria over the next five years.

The investment also establishes a development-impact partnership between Ororo and Rising Tide Africa, with both parties agreeing to track how the expansion affects the people participating in the collection network, the statement said.

Under the preliminary five-year targets, Ororo Waste wants to grow its formally paid collector network from roughly 5,000 people today to more than 200,000 by 2031. It also plans to increase certified UCO collection from the few thousand metric tonnes it has exported to date to more than 150,000 tonnes annually by 2031.

“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,” said Yemi Keri, co-founder of Rising Tide Africa. “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.”

The investment builds on work Ororo began in Lagos in July with the Lagos State Environmental Protection Agency, Shell Foundation and the Waste Pickers Association of Nigeria (WAPAN). The organisations trained roughly 250 market women, waste pickers and youths at the Lagos Chamber of Commerce and Industry on the safe collection, handling and storage of used cooking oil. The programme was part of a partnership between Ororo and the Lagos State government to expand household used cooking oil collection through LASEPA’s zonal offices.

Ororo Waste’s fundraise comes as African climate-tech companies turn locally produced waste into an economic resource. In September, Nigerian climate-tech startup Biochar Industrial Group raised $1.5 million to convert agricultural waste from food-processing factories into biochar and carbon-removal credits.

Ororo Waste expects to complete a baseline income survey of the first formally onboarded collector cohort from the July training by the end of 2026. It plans to use the results to track income and employment outcomes for participating women, waste pickers and young people, alongside the gender composition of its workforce and leadership, as part of its environmental, social and governance (ESG) reporting.

“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,” Banjo said.

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