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A Northern woman perhaps might have been attributed with some stereotypes – such as early marriage and no access to education.
However, Intissar Bashir Kurfir defiles the odds. Her motif is to uphold the 6th SDG, which is to provide clean water and sanitation, and this accounts for her decision to start a recycling company that produces toilets and interlock tiles from waste bottles and used sachet water bags.
She is a trained Architect from the prestigious Ahmadu Bello University and has a diploma in Interior Design from Albedo Design School Abuja. She runs Ifrique Collections and Designs Limited.
In her quest to uphold the 6th SDG, she invented the Sustainovation Solution, a company that intends to make interlocks and public toilets from recycled items in Abuja. She explains her mode of operation in clear terms. In her view, it takes over 15,000 pep bottles to make a two-bedroom flat and 500 sachet water bags to create one interlock tile. This means that she needs as many hands as she can get to help her sort and gather these desired waste materials around town.
Currently, her company produces for private entities with the hopes that her work would gather as much international reputation to get her a job with UNICEF to build schools and toilets in regions where they are needed.
One of the greatest limitations her business has had so far has been the availability of funds; she believes her production capacity can be expanded if she has access to funds to acquire more machines that enable her to manufacture more Interlock tiles.
For her, she believes in the scalability of her interlock business as it is an essential commodity required daily for the construction of houses in her local environment and beyond, because it not only keeps the environment clean, whilst creating employment opportunities for everyone involved in the means of production. She believes her establishment can employ over 500 Nigerians in Abuja alone when it gets fully functional.
