14 min read

Meet Gaetan Rajaofera Building a Waste Management Company in Madagascar

December 29, 2024

Meet Gaetan Rajaofera Building a Waste Management Company in Madagascar

Gaetan Rajaofera is the co-founder of Greentsika, a Malagasy waste management company with a social vocation. With varied experience in communication, project management, and journalism, he combines his skills to improve waste management and promote sustainable development in Tuléar.

Gaetan Rajaofera shared with Today Africa the story of Greentsika, how it began, and where they are now.

Read the French translation here.

Tell us a bit about yourself

I’m Gaetan Rajaofera, I’m co-founder and the operations manager of Greentsika. Greentsika is a social enterprise based in Toliara, specializing in collecting waste at home.

As for my journey today, I have a fairly classic one. I went to the University of Antananarivo, I obtained a master’s degree in law and political science.

Then I joined a legal office based in Tarn-le-Riv, and in 2015 I settled in Toliara, where I worked for a German NGO. In 2017, we started Greentsika with three other people, which is the first social enterprise to collect waste from Tuléar.

What inspired you to start our business?

The initial idea was quite simple. One of my partners and I worked for an NGO and we were already taking care of waste in Tuléar.

It’s a German NGO called Welthungerhilfe. They’ve been working in Toliara since 2014 to support the city to manage its waste better and proposed policies to manage waste in urban environments.

The observation was that the waste collection in homes, which is practiced today everywhere in Madagascar and in African cities, is mainly reserved for informal sectors, with precarious conditions that are attached to it.

And it is in this perspective that we have already built Greentsika to formalize the profession, but also to provide the customer with a professional solution with an adapted customer service. And that’s how we integrated the new technologies.

So we solve several problems, we improve the management of waste in the urban environment, since we offer a solution that is flexible, adapted to the needs of citizens.

We fight against the production of wild waste, which was a real nuisance before we started. We also fight against practices of very little orthodox waste. People are used to burning their waste or burying them in holes, which is completely negative for the planet.

So the idea was to bring a solution to this waste management problem and to allow people to have an offer that suits them and that should be flexible, adapted to their needs.

What challenges did you face when you started Greentsika?

The main challenge we faced was to convince people that it was a solution that could change their lives. There was a need, the population was very demanding.

Despite everything, we had to convince people and we did a lot of work to raise awareness. We used resources that already existed, in particular through door-to-door awareness.

We also used more traditional means, like radio, TV, etc. And today, with the advent of new technologies, and especially social networks, we have put a lot of emphasis on the use of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc. All of this to carry our message even further and stronger.

Among the problems we also encountered was the fact of formalizing a sector where people are used to small people doing this job. So when I say small people, in general they are people excluded from the system. It can be alcoholics, it can be homeless people, it can be children.

And the idea was really to formalize the job to be able to offer decent conditions. And thus take people who normally work in the informal sector and formalize them by offering them all the conditions that a formal job can offer them. Including the right to stay, the insurance for the disease, the insurance for retirement.

And today too, with a little pride on our side, we managed to bank all our employees, so 100% of our employees are banked, which allows them to access bank products. For example, loans, and so on, to be able to plan their future.

Can you describe the process of launching your business?

We created our company in 2017. It took us about two years to work on it before officially launching it. At first, it was at the level of the German NGO Welthungerhilfe that we worked on the concept.

In 2016, the NGO had launched a collaboration project with associations to provide what we call pre-collect service, which is what we do today. Pre-collect consists of taking the waste into the households’ homes and bringing them back to the point of collection. In Thuléard, these are garbage bins.

And so that’s what we call pre-collect. And so the NGO had set up this with local associations. Unfortunately, it didn’t work too well due to technical problems, lack of follow-up, etc and in 2017 we decided to work on the project again, with the NGO Welthungerhilfe.

Together we thought about how to improve things, starting from the observation that was made a year ago. From that observation, we put in place new means, including the membership card with a QR code to know if they went to a certain client and if the client paid for the subscription.

That’s how we launched Greentsika, with the support of the German NGO in question. In December 2017, we officially used the things by registering our company at the state level.

How did you raise capital for your business?

We’ve not really raised capital for our business. Greentsika was initially supported by the NGO Welthungerhilfe as I said earlier. But as time went by, the idea was to develop an activity that would be able to support itself.

That’s how we have existed and continue to exist today. We mainly work on our own funds. At times we had external support, particularly by participating in startup contests. For example, in 2019 we won the Total Startup Challenge. We were in third position, which brought us a small capital.

In 2021, we won the AFT Digital Challenge, which brought us capital. But overall, our company is financed on its own, with the money we generate through our activities.

What is your business model and how does Greentsika generate revenue?

Our business model is based on a subscription system. When tenants want us to pick up their trash, they choose an offer that suits them. This offer depends on the number of trash bags to pick up at their place, at each step, and it also depends on the number of steps they want.

For example, the landlord can say, I would like you to come to my place three times a week and collect two bags of garbage at each pass. And depending on the size of the offer, they pay a monthly subscription exclusively via mobile money or bank cards directly on our website.

The idea was to make a product that is affordable that all households can access. Our supply today starts from 4000 Ariary per month, or a little less than 1 euro per month, up to 40,000 Ariary per month, or about 5 euros per month.

Since our launch, what attracted us and made us keep our resilience today, that we are still there. I think it is the aspect of new technology that has much more to the client, in the sense that they now have the right to a service that is regulated.

We have a strict follow-up, since each of our customers is equipped with a QR code card. We know when the cleaning is done or not. And I think that’s what makes us strong and it’s this system that we would like to see spread over our city, whether in Madagascar or Africa, today.

How do you manage your time and prioritize your tasks?

Today, we are lucky to live in an era where there are more tools that allow us to manage our time and prioritize certain tasks. And it is from these tools that we are inspired to build our own management interface for our employees and our team. But I use time management tools like Arc, Asana, Trello, Notion, etc. to work and manage my daily life as an entrepreneur.

What is your approach to hiring and building a team?

My approach, our approach is quite simple. First, you have to know that waste is a rather complicated environment, quite difficult in the sense that it is not for most people, it is not a rewarding job, but yet it is a necessary job, so someone has to do it.

Today, our team is mainly composed of employees from the informal sector, people who don’t necessarily have access to employment, lack of diplomas, or because they don’t know how to read or write, etc.

It should be noted that in Madagascar, the literacy rate is only 52%, so more than half of the population doesn’t know how to read or write. And that’s where we want to make the difference. We build our team, we try to support them so that they can grow with us.

For example, we offer them literacy classes, we teach them to read and write. Our recruitment is based on people from the informal sector, as I said. What we do is we put in place a screening system. And then we put in place a reward system to motivate people to find staff who want to work with us.

How is your business doing today and what does the future look like?

Our business today has a thousand customers, so a thousand households are registered and subscribed to the service. At the moment we only work on Tulear, we serve about 10,000 people in the whole city of Toliara, which is still very small, since the population of Toliara has about 300,000 inhabitants.

We only serve about 2-3% of the population. Today we collect between 3-4 tons of waste per day with our cyclobenes and our team. We manage about twenty employees with various positions. There are the pickers, who we call pre-collectors.

There is also the back-office team who manage the daily life of the company. And the front-office team with animators and visualizers who are responsible for the awareness and follow-up of our employees.

For the future, we hope to be able to extend our services to other cities, whether in Madagascar or elsewhere in Africa. I think it’s a service that has potential. I think it’s a service that many cities could need.

We are offering an alternative that is more ecological, that allows us to fight against the harmful effects of waste production in urban or rural environments. In the future, we hope to launch new services, including integrating what we call a circular economy to be able to give life to the waste that we harvest.

Today we are not there because of the lack of resources. We are not a big company with a lot of resources, but we hope that in the near future we will be able to develop projects that are innovative and that can bring people a permanent solution to improve their daily lives.

What key lessons have you learned in your journey as an entrepreneur?

The lessons I learned as an entrepreneur, especially social entrepreneurship, is that it’s a difficult field. You need to know how to be resilient. And I think the main lesson we learn is the ability to become resilient. Because it’s difficult there are always things to deal with on a daily basis.

There are always problems or opportunities. So these are quite difficult things, in the sense that we are not necessarily prepared for that. Personally, I didn’t necessarily receive an education as an entrepreneur. At the beginning, managing a company was really a big challenge for us.

We were all a bit novice in all the management of the company. But over the years, we’ve been working at Greentsika for five years now, and we’ve built the company. So we’ve more or less prepared ourselves, we’ve adapted ourselves to the challenges and opportunities that we can have on a daily basis as an entrepreneur.

How do you stay motivated and inspired in times of setbacks or failures?

I think it’s quite simple. As I said, you have to be resilient. You have to resist the hard times. We always had hard times, from the beginning, and we still have some today. But you have to be resilient and adapt.

Because behind an opportunity, necessarily, hides a problem. And that’s how we take things, We try to make sure that the company can run despite everything and never let itself be beaten.

That’s the biggest motivation is to stay positive no matter what happens and to be able to continue its activity despite the difficulties whether it is external factors like politics for example, or whether it is internal factors like theft in the company, unemployment for example.

But I think that’s really it. The secret of a good entrepreneur is really his ability to be resilient and above all to adapt to the situation.

What advice would you give to others who are starting their business?

My advice for those who are going to start their own business is that, first of all, I think today there are a lot of incubators, or mentors, who can provide support. For us, it was one of our strengths, and from the beginning we were taught how to manage a company.

We really tried to approach all the initiatives that encouraged startups, companies, and young people to get out of the water. We joined several training programs, several support programs that we could not think of and which have brought us this capacity to manage and optimize the operation of our company.

My second advice would be not to be afraid to innovate, to change things, to be what we call a game changer. When we started, for example, many people told us that such a service would never work in Toliara.

That it can’t work and we can never convince anyone to sign up for our service and pay their subscription etc. But we did and five years later we are still here. We have more than a thousand customers today who pay their subscription, who trust us.

And finally, the third advice I would give is to completely trust the new technologies. Well, not trust them, but appropriate them. It’s very important, I think, because today there are a lot of technologies that can support entrepreneurs, help entrepreneurs who are beginners.

It’s a great opportunity for us as entrepreneurs. For example, Greentsika is taking advantage of the penetration rate of mobile currency all over Africa. Today in Madagascar, we have about 11 million people who have a mobile phone and a mobile currency account.