My cash crop : From this weed, I make trendy carrier bags

Michael Otieno is 30. There is a lot that can be said about this young man but what stands out is the ingenious way he is using water hyacinth to make paper bags.

His work – from harvesting the raw material to peeling the paper sheet from a frame – is meticulous but equally rewarding to his ambitions.

Save for ‘planting’, Otieno is every bit a farmer as the potato wizard who ends up with French fries for sale.

Lake Victoria is a wide natural resource. Her massive bowels have continued to churn out tonnes of fish over the years. In other words, the lake is a massive aquaculture centre, with no apparent agricultural process.

And then, a few decades ago, the lake lost its silver reflection. In its place came a rapidly encroaching plant that covered the surface: the water hyacinth.

Standing on the edge of Kiboko beach, on the shores of Lake Victoria, one can’t help but enjoy the almost artistic patterns the hyacinth forms on the surface.

The individual hyacinth plant presents with bulbous stems – full with low density spongy fibres. At its base tiny roots hang into the water to suck nutrients.

The hyacinth is not a solitary plant. They tangle up to form massive green carpeting that can sometimes cover acres of the lake.

When this happens, fishing vessels get tangled by the hyacinth; blocking them from going on fishing expeditions.

You may have heard experts attribute dwindling fish populations in Lake Victoria to water hyacinth.

That is because this floating beauty, block sunlight from reaching the lake’s aquatic plants.

Hyacinth mess

Aquatic plants need sunlight to thrive and die off when the hyacinth populates the surface. Without the plants, fish have no food.

To put it plainly, water hyacinth is everything that a Lake Victoria fisherman dreads.

“If it were a vegetable, it would be of great help. But it is not. So, nobody really wants the water hyacinth to be here,” Odhiambo Odhiambo, a fisherman at Lake Victoria says.

Otieno, one would say, has found good within the knotted hyacinth mess.

“This is a huge economic activity for me,” he says. “The hyacinth is my source of livelihood.”

The familiar narrative has been that a farmer plants a seed, the seed grows into a plant, and the plant yields a harvest in some way or form.

Which begs the question: what if the plant was already available, thanks to the spontaneity of mother Earth?

Do you live blind to the harvest having participated not in the nature of its abundance?

The water hyacinth, Otieno says, had been around for so long. Harvesting the crop would do no harm.

Plus, the County Government of Kisumu having previously declared a war against the hyacinth, he would be doing public good.

“On one harvesting trip I move about 4 tonnes of hyacinth to the workshop,” Otieno says.

Together with a few farm helps, Otieno chops the hyacinth into smaller pieces, much like a chaff cutter shreds Napier grass.

The pieces are then dried in the sun until at least 50 per cent of moisture is lost.

Thereafter the dried pieces are placed in a shredding tank and mixed with clean water.

Otieno will also add waste paper (these could be carton boxes, used books, newspapers) into the shredding tank.

Mortar and pestle

“Every nine parts of the hyacinth are mixed with one part of waste paper,” he says.

The shredding tank is powered by electricity. In twenty minutes it does a good job shredding and mixing the contents into a paste.

A lot more takes place before a sheet is retrieved from a frame ready for use.

Michael has been making paper bags from water hyacinth since 2006. “That is when I learnt the craft,” he says.

Michael intimately interacted with water hyacinth for the first time when he had just dropped out of school.

“I was supposed to progress to Form Two but my parents couldn’t raise my fees. So, an uncle who worked at Kisumu Innovation Centre Kenya (KICK) implored me to sign up for a crafting course.”

At KICK, Otieno learnt how to use fibre threads from water hyacinth to model door mats, table mats, chairs, baskets and many other products.

Despite being an apprentice, Otieno’s work proved to be better than his masters’. He was hence offered pay.

“The money came in handy because I used it to pay my fees. I cleared high school in 2004 in Kisumu Boys,” he says.

In 2006, Otieno went back to KICK, and under the stewardship of a Mr Muchilwa, studied, developed and tested various ways of using water hyacinth to make paper.

“A lot of what we did, and the equipment we used, were manual.”

For instance, instead of an electricity-powered shredding tank, the duo crushed the hyacinth using a mortar and pestle.

How he does it

In 2014, Otieno applied for a NET Fund competition, which sought to reward the best green innovations in every county in Kenya.

He filled out an online form, in which he outlined his water hyacinth-to-paper idea, under the SME category.

Otieno knew he stood a good chance to emerge the winner for Kisumu County. But out of humility, he also imagined other worthy competitors bagging the price.

And so, when he received that inevitable call every winner receives, he was pleasantly surprised.

With the money he received from NET Fund, Otieno set up the current workshop in which he processes the hyacinth.

“But there is still a lot I could use to speed up the process of making the paper,” he says. “With modern machinery I could produce in excess of 2,500 paper bags every day.”

The water hyacinth drifts on the surface of Lake Victoria with changing wind direction. Some months there will be very little or no water hyacinth on the shores of Kiboko beach.

“That means the wind has pushed the hyacinth farther into the lake. Some months it will drift back. It just keeps changing location and spreading,” Otieno says.

Otieno knows the hyacinth is a menace. He understands the exasperation on the part of Kisumu residents.

And so, wherever the hyacinth goes, he will follow it, and harvest it – as much as he can.

He hopes to one day run a fully functioning paper manufacturing factory that would speed up the process of ridding the lake of the hyacinth.

Where others have seen a menace, Otieno sees a cash crop.