Ororo Waste Management, whose name draws from the Yoruba word for cooking oil, has secured fresh capital to expand what is quickly becoming formal infrastructure around one of Nigeria's most overlooked waste streams. Founded in 2021 by former PwC consultant Ayodele Banjo and Lawson Nzekwe, the Lagos based company has received up to 1.4 billion naira, about 1 million dollars, from Rising Tide Africa, a women-led pan-African angel investment network, with the first tranche arriving on September 16 and additional funding potentially available through December 16.

The scale of the opportunity behind that investment is genuinely enormous. Nigeria produces an estimated 840,000 metric tons of used cooking oil a year, and more than 95 percent currently goes uncaptured, oil that often ends up discarded into drains and waterways, contributing to blockages and worsening local flooding, or in some cases unsafely reused in food preparation despite carcinogenic risks. Ororo's entire business is built around capturing that wasted supply and channeling it toward a very different market, one hungry for exactly this kind of feedstock. The capital will help Ororo purchase used cooking oil from its collector network and cover the operating costs of its collection hubs, which currently operate across Lagos, Abuja and Port Harcourt, with plans to expand to more than 40 hubs across Nigeria over the next five years.

What sets Ororo apart from simply being another waste collection startup is the credibility it has built on the export side. 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, supplying an expanding cohort of tier-one offtakers in Europe's biofuel and sustainable aviation fuel markets. That certification matters enormously, since, as Rising Tide Africa co founder Yemi Keri put it, refiners in Europe don't buy good intentions, they buy documented, ISCC-certified tonnes.

The investment also carries a deliberate gender lens. Market women and waste pickers already do most of the collecting, yet few have ever been paid fairly for that work, and even fewer at scale, with Keri framing the capital as funding the infrastructure that pays those women the same day, for a commodity some of the world's largest offtakers are already contracted to buy. On the technology side, 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, with roughly 5,000 collectors currently on its network.

That formalization push has institutional backing beyond Rising Tide Africa too. The expansion builds on a programme involving Ororo Waste, the Lagos State Environmental Protection Agency, Shell Foundation and the Waste Pickers Association of Nigeria, which trained about 250 market women, waste pickers and youths in the safe collection, handling and storage of used cooking oil, with LASEPA naming Ororo its official partner for institutional scale UCO collection and export earlier in the year. With ambitions to grow its formally paid collector network from roughly 5,000 people to more than 200,000 by 2031, while increasing certified collection to over 150,000 tonnes annually, Ororo Waste is betting that Nigeria's most ignored kitchen waste can become the backbone of a genuinely inclusive circular economy, one same-day mobile money payment at a time.