Rising Tide Africa has committed up to ₦1.4 billion ($1 million) to Ororo Waste Management Limited to expand used cooking oil collection infrastructure and provide working capital in Nigeria.

The investment will help Ororo Waste purchase used cooking oil from collectors and cover the operating costs of its collection hubs. The Lagos-based company plans to grow from three hubs in Lagos, Abuja and Port Harcourt to more than 40 hubs across Nigeria over the next five years.

Rising Tide Africa is a women-led pan-African angel investment network. Ororo Waste, founded in 2021, collects used cooking oil from households, markets, restaurants and other institutional generators for export. The company is also Lagos State’s partner for institutional-scale used cooking oil collection and export.

The first allocation was received on September 16, while additional funding may be available through December 16. The amount of the first allocation was not disclosed.

Building a formal collection network

Nigeria consumes an estimated 1 million tons of vegetable oil annually and produces about 1.4 million metric tonnes of palm oil each year. However, there is limited formal infrastructure to collect and recover cooking oil after it has been discarded, leaving much of the waste stream uncaptured.

Ororo Waste says its collection platform uses GPS and QR codes to track oil from collectors through to export containers. The company is certified under the International Sustainability and Carbon Certification system as a collector and exporter of used cooking oil.

Ororo Waste currently has a formally paid network of roughly 5,000 collectors. Its preliminary targets include more than 200,000 formally paid collectors and over 150,000 tonnes of certified used cooking oil collection annually by 2031. The company has exported a few thousand metric tonnes of certified used cooking oil to date.

Ayo Banjo, Ororo Waste’s co-chief executive officer, said the investment would help fund the physical infrastructure and working capital needed to build the business.

“Refiners in Europe don’t buy good intentions—they buy documented, ISCC-certified tonnes. 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,” Banjo said.

Focus on collector incomes

The investment establishes a development-impact partnership between Ororo Waste and Rising Tide Africa. Both organisations agreed to track how the expansion affects people participating in the collection network.

In July, Ororo Waste began work in Lagos with the Lagos State Environmental Protection Agency, Shell Foundation and the Waste Pickers Association of Nigeria. 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 formed part of a partnership between Ororo Waste and the Lagos State government to expand household collection through LASEPA’s zonal offices.

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. The company plans to use the results to track income and employment outcomes, as well as the gender composition of its workforce and leadership, through its environmental, social and governance reporting.

Yemi Keri, co-founder of Rising Tide Africa, said market women and waste pickers already undertake much of the collection work but are not always paid fairly or at scale.

“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,” Keri said.

Banjo said Ororo Waste aims to deploy infrastructure capable of providing dignified incomes to several hundred thousand women over time.