At 21 many Ugandans are usually in some form of tertiary educational institution. Very few of them would imagine juggling campus life with a side business manufacturing and selling paper bags to retail shops in the capital Kampala.

But not Andrew Mupuya, a second-year Economic student  at  Kampala University, who started off five years ago by collecting used plastic bottles from dump sites across Kampala to sell them to recycling companies.

He later used the $12 worth of savings from the ventures to start a paper bag business and now employs up to 15 other young men to help him manufacture 20,000 paper bags per week by hand, which he sells to supermarkets and drug stores.

“When people saw me collecting those plastic bags they though probably I’ve run mad. But I knew what I was doing,” Mupuya told DW in an interview.

“I had to watch YouTube videos of how people made them in India. That’s how I learned to make them, then I made a sample and took to the supermarkets and shops who gave me orders to supply them.”