MIT Student Turns Trash App Into Community-Led Solution

When Akorfa Dagadu tried to fix the recycling problem in her Accra, Ghana neighborhood, she built an app from behind a desk at MIT. Implementation proved she'd overlooked something crucial: the solution was already there.

Dagadu grew up in what locals call the trash capital of Accra, watching plastic waste pile up in her community. As an MIT chemical engineering student, she co-founded Ishara, a mobile app designed to make recycling easier and create jobs.

But when she actually returned home to launch it, reality hit hard. Informal networks of waste pickers and aggregators were already collecting and processing recyclables every single day.

"They'd developed a system that was already working, but it was invisible, undervalued, and excluded from larger recycling conversations," Dagadu explains. Her app wasn't solving a problem. It was ignoring the people who already were.

That's when she found MIT's PKG Center for Social Impact. The center teaches technical founders to step back and understand systems before diving into solutions.

Over three years and multiple fellowships, Dagadu transformed Ishara completely. Instead of replacing existing networks, her refined app now connects them to the broader recycling value chain using blockchain technology that ensures transparent, fair payments.

The shift went deeper than just her app. "The biggest thing PKG has given me is a way of thinking," Dagadu says. "You start to see everything as connected. Technical solutions are not just technical; they have social and economic implications."

She partnered with Chanja Datti, a Nigerian recycling company, to tackle one of recycling's toughest challenges: multilayer plastic waste. Her chemical engineering research now focuses on using enzymes to break down these hard-to-recycle materials.

The journey got lonely when her co-founders stepped away. "The doubt, the weight of decisions became very real, very quickly," she recalls. But the community she built through PKG and MIT's entrepreneurship programs kept her grounded.

The Ripple Effect

Dagadu's evolution from solution-first to community-first thinking is already spreading. She works with high school students in Ghana, teaching them not just about recycling but about listening to communities first. Her research on plastic degradation could help recycling operations across Africa process materials they currently can't handle.

Next year, she'll take her systems thinking approach to Tsinghua University as a Schwarzman Scholar, where she'll connect what she's learned in Ghana to larger global challenges.

What started as an app is now something bigger: a model for how engineers can serve communities by building with them, not for them.