Eighteen clean innovation startups from across Africa gathered in Cape Town earlier this month for the Friedrich Naumann Foundation (FNF) Afri GreenPitch Challenge 2026, hosted and administered by GreenCape.

Pee-Cycling was named the winning innovator, with this startup converting human urine into fertiliser and non-potable water.

Mattie's Success, a Botswana-based enterprise that converts banana stem waste into safe, biodegradable hair braiding fibre, was the runner-up and winner of the People’s Choice Award.

GreenCape is a green economy development agency and City of Cape Town- (CoCT-) supported special purpose vehicle.

This year marks the first time that the GreenPitch challenge has expanded its reach across the African continent.

GreenCape first launched the event in 2018, when Cape Town was experiencing a severe drought.

In the years since then, the event has expanded its mandate to cover multiple subsectors, including the circular economy, renewable energy, sustainable agriculture, sustainable mobility, and water and wastewater.

This year’s event saw 18 finalists, selected from more than 300 entries, pitch their innovations to a panel of judges and potential investors.

The finalists included startups from Namibia, Botswana, Lesotho, Kenya, Tanzania and South Africa.

This year’s winner, Pee-Cycling, was co-founded by Dyllon Randall and Caitlin Courtney, who developed the process through the Department of Civil Engineering and the Future Water Institute at the University of Cape Town.

“The FNF Afri GreenPitch Challenge gave us access to people and expertise we would not otherwise have had and pushed us to think harder about how we grow,” says Randall.

“Winning is a real boost for the team, and it comes at exactly the right moment as we move towards our first commercial urine-to-fertiliser plant.”

Pee-Cycling currently operates a pilot plant at the DHL Stadium in Cape Town.

Working in partnership with Bidvest Prestige, the company collects urine from the stadium and converts it on site into a liquid fertiliser, recovering both nutrients and water that would otherwise be flushed away.

The startup collected 3 600 l alone during the South Africa vs New Zealand rugby game in August.

This project is still in an experimental phase, however, and the fertiliser has not been used anywhere as of yet.

“This comes from just a single bathroom, and from just one of the four urinal troughs in it. So the scope to scale up the volume that can be collected from venues is substantial,” notes Randall.

Pee-Cycling’s primary technology uses advanced membrane processes, specifically reverse osmosis, to treat human urine at the source.

Instead of flushing these nutrients into the sea or through municipal sewers, the startup’s system extracts concentrated liquid fertilisers rich in nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium.

Beyond nutrient extraction, the process also addresses the challenge of water scarcity.

For every litre of urine processed, the system recovers about 700 ml of water that can be reused for non-potable applications, such as irrigation or industrial cooling.

This year’s GreenPitch event was opened by CoCT Economic Growth MMC James Vos.

“GreenPitch is centred on finding innovative solutions to environmental and climate challenges; strengthening small businesses and helping them bring valuable concepts to market; supporting the growth of industries such as clean energy and the circular economy; and building partnerships that create new avenues of economic opportunity.

“Its expansion into a continent-wide challenge reflects both the scale of the environmental challenges facing African economies and the opportunities these challenges create for innovation, enterprise development and investment,” said Vos.

“That is what GreenPitch is about: turning challenges into solutions and solutions into economic opportunities.”

“For a green business, the hardest stretch is rarely the idea – it is the journey from first customer to first factory,” added GreenCape green finance programme manager Lisa Johannson at the event.

“That stretch is the pioneer gap, and the FNF Afri GreenPitch Challenge exists to close it, opening the way to investment in the green economy and the jobs that follow.”

Vos said enabling this kind of innovation was one of the reasons CoCT continued to support GreenCape and its work in developing South Africa’s green economy.

“Since GreenCape was established in 2010, it has facilitated approximately R70-billion in green economy investment and supported the creation of about 22 000 jobs across South Africa.

“Between 2020 and 2025 alone, the organisation supported 1 242 small, medium-sized and microenterprises, hosted more than 100 industry events, facilitated over 1 000 industry and stakeholder engagements, and produced publicly accessible market intelligence resources that have been downloaded more than 30 000 times.”