Nairobi-based start-up company, Gjenge Makers, founded by Nzambi Matee, has created a lightweight and low-cost building material that is made of recycled plastic with sand to make bricks that are stronger than concrete material. Nzambi Matee, a 29-year-old trained engineer and schooled in biochemistry, founded new ways of converting waste into sustainable materials. With her initiative, Matee has recently been named a Young Champion of the Earth 2020 Africa winner at the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).

Her company Gjenge Makers' produced about 500-100 bricks per day, recycling close to 500 kilograms of plastic waste a day. Her company gets the plastic waste from packaging factories or buys it from other recyclers, and she mixes it with sand as the binder. The company has three machines. The extruder does the mixing of plastic waste with sand at very high temperatures and then the press compresses it. Plastic is fibrous in nature, so therefore, the brick ends up having a stronger compression strength. The bricks produced are highly durable and diminish their maintenance cost. The company's paving bricks are fully certified by the Kenyan Bureau of Standards. They have a melting point of over 350 degrees, and they are much stronger than their concrete equivalents.

Matee, who specialized in material science and worked as an engineer in Kenya's oil industry, was inspired to launch her business after routinely coming across plastic bags strewn along Nairobi's streets. In 2017, she quit her job as a data analyst and set up a small lab in her mother's backyard. There, she began creating and testing brick pavers, which are a combination of plastic and sand. Although her neighbours complained about the noisy machine she was using, Matee waited for a year to develop the right ratios for her paving bricks. She shut down her social life for a year and put all her savings into the business. Through trial and error, she and her team learned that some plastics bind together better than others. Her project was given a boost when Matee won a scholarship to attend a social entrepreneurship training programme in the United States of America. With her paver samples packed in her luggage, she used the material labs at the Univesity of Colorado Boulder to further test and refine the ratios of sand to plastic. With this process, Matee also developed the machinery she is using to make bricks.

(adapted from source:https://worldarchitecture.org/article-links/egmeg/kenyan-startup-founder-nzambi-matee-recycles-plastic-to-make-bricks-that-are-stronger-than-

Question

1. Like Nzambi Matee, think of a business idea that has the potential to succeed. Provide a detailed explanation of this business idea, including details of how the idea was generated and how the feasibility of the idea was determined.

2. Drawing from the extract, discuss five (5) personal characteristics of entrepreneurs that Nzambi demonstrates and provide relevant examples from the extract.