How Kisumu innovator is making shoes and leather jackets from fish skin

For a long time, fish filleting firms along Lake Victoria, especially in Kisumu county, dumped the waste from fish in the area, leading to environmental pollution and degradation.

Coupled with the stench from the waste, the area along the lake was a nightmare for residents. One of the residents is Newton Owino, a leather chemist who spent day and night plotting a solution for the fish waste. Leveraging his knowledge on leather chemistry, and with consistent research, Owino came up with the idea of turning the fish waste into meaningful and useful products. He established a firm where he could collect the waste and turn the fish skin into leather, which he then used to make products such as shoes, jackets, belts and even book covers. "The main idea was actually to sustainably manage this waste and also to generate income. We didn't just look at it as waste," Owino says. The process of converting the waste is straightforward. After collecting the waste, Owino pretreats the skin to convert it into a belt and then into leather. He uses natural substances such as papain from papaya fruit. Owino also dyes the leather to give it an appealing look for his clients. "Mostly we export our fish leather products to other parts of the world but we have also started penetrating the local market. I would say our fish skin leather is more of exotic, something new amongst us. So it will take some time for it to be adopted fully here," he adds. Through this initiative, Owino has not managed to clean up the environment around the Lake Victoria area, but also created employment opportunities for the youth and women in Kisumu. "I want to urge the youth to look around them and see value in things around them. The leather business is very lucrative, but people think it is only for the less fortunate in society. If we tap into this fully, it is something one can do until they lose their eyesight," Owino says.