Helsinki Incubators Alumni Ecocan: "Bringing Finnish Recycling Expertise to Africa"

We met with just a day before she caught a flight back to Nairobi for the next few months, a perfectly fitting scene for a founder who basically lives across two continents. For a long time, Sonja’s career path seemed to be set. At just 14 years old, she decided she was going to be a diplomat, maybe even an ambassador one day. But while she was interning at the UN through the Finnish Embassy in Nairobi, and studying at the University of Helsinki at the same time, she realised how slow policies change, and waiting for bureaucracy to create real change could take decades.

Sonja wanted action, and she wanted to see impact much faster. But making the leap into the startup world didn't mean throwing away her past. Instead, she found a way to bring all her different sides together. Today, there's Sonja the researcher, Sonja the potential future diplomat, and Sonja the entrepreneur. Rather than trading one role for another, she learned to merge her different worlds. She practiced putting on an "entrepreneur mask" when it was time to talk business, and by co-founding , she brought her experience in research, policy, and business together to tackle two of East Africa's most pressing problems.

Ecocan’s idea came around 2018. Sonja noticed Kenya's broken recycling value chain- the series of steps required to turn waste back into useful products- and wondered how the Finnish depository system could be adapted for areas lacking infrastructure. But the recycling issue was only half the battle. In Kenya, every fifth product sold is counterfeit. People collect bottles, fill them with substances, like methanol, and sell them as genuine drinks. To address both issues, Ecocan digitalized the Finnish recycling model and customized it for the East African market.   

• For safety: Consumers use the Ecocan app to scan a QR code on a beverage bottle, and verify its authenticity before taking a sip.
• For recycling: Once they finish their drink, the users check from the app where is the closest point that they can return the empty bottle to an Ecocan agent. The agent scans their ID and instantly sends the deposit refund to their mobile money account.
• For sustainability: From there, Ecocan’s team takes the bottles to their washing facility, equipped to handle up to 10,000 bottles in a single hour. Once sanitized, the bottles are sold back to beverage producers and recycling partners.  

To truly understand how that counterfeit chain worked, one of the co-founders disguised himself and spent weeks undercover in poor neighbourhoods. He pretended to be a counterfeiter in order to learn exactly how those underground operations worked. Meanwhile, to secure their first B2B clients, the team would hang out in bars frequented by CEOs just to get a few minutes with them and pitch them their idea. And before they could afford to hire people, their very first bottle collectors were homeless individuals.

When Sonja joined the Helsinki Incubators' Pathways programme, Ecocan was already operational. However, the programme offered her a theoretical framework that she used to reflect on her strategy, and a community that shared the challenges and milestones all founders encounter.  

"I learned a lot by watching series & documentaries about successful founders... you think that these are superhumans who are building things," Sonja admitted. "When I joined Pathways, I realised like, okay, actually I'm doing quite well. I gained lots of confidence. I also realized there are a lot of founders who are not like Mark Zuckerberg... They are actually just normal, regular people." She realized it’s perfectly normal to freeze up, to be human and to not have all the answers.

Ecocan recently surpassed the €1 million mark in total funding. The team is now scaling up, moving into a new facility that can wash up to 10,000 bottles an hour. The startup’s success has even caught the attention of national media and led to an invitation to meet the President of Finland during his visit to Kenya. Looking ahead, Ecocan is planning to open 20 to 25 bottle return locations across Nairobi.   

However, Ecocan’s mission goes beyond numbers. In Kenya, recycling is viewed as something only for those struggling financially. Sonja is determined to rebrand it into a modern well-accepted habit. Just as importantly, she wants to change how investors view the continent. "I hope that it will also change the attitudes that people have towards doing business in Africa, because it's usually seen almost like a charity," she noted. "Actually, Africa is going to be the next, like Asia... you missed a good opportunity by not investing back then."