Patu Ndango Fen

Mandela Washington Fellowship Reciprocal Exchange

Major / Minor: Environmental Engineering

Graduation Year: 2020

Patu is an Environmental Engineer graduate from Newcastle university. She is passionate Social Entrepreneur, promoter of circular economy and climate action activist.
Patu is the founding president of a not-for-profit organisation known as Closed-Loop System Ventures (CLSV) Foundation which is involved in developing and implementing environmental sustainability projects. She also owns a social enterprise which transforms different types of waste materials into valuable marketable products. For example, they produce furniture out of waste tires, old CDs, crushed glass and bottle caps. They also make beautiful flower pots using textile waste. These flower pots are very useful for both indoor and out door space decoration as well for the practice of sustainable urban farming.
Patu is also the co-founder of Game Changers, a powerful movement legally registered with ambition to mobilise at least one million non-state actors to commit to minimising their carbon/environmental footprint.
She has successfully Co-championed the implementation of projects such as the very first circular economy forum in Cameroon (2022); a high level private sector climate commitment event; “green” growth capacity building workshops for over 100 small and medium sized enterprises ; plastic waste collection and sensitisation activities with over 250 tons of plastic waste collected; waste recycling training workshops and tree planting activities among several other environmental sustainability projects.
Patu is a 2017 TechWomen fellow (USA) ; 2019 One Young World Ambassador; an Associate fellow of the Royal Commonwealth Society; a 2019/2020 Chevening Scholar; a 2016 Tony Elumelu Foundation Entrepreneur; and a 2018 Obama Leader among several other accolades.
She has taken part in several international events where she intervened sharing her experience on the work she carries out in Cameroon to help ameliorate the waste management system and push forward the climate agenda such as:
- The international conference on climate action (Heidelberg, Germany - 2019).
- Tokyo international conference on Africa Development- 2019 among several others.

She looks forward to establishing the very first showroom in Cameroon where products derived from different waste materials will be showcased and sold. It will also be a space to raise awareness on the numerous opportunities that a circular economy presents in terms of job creation, exploitation of secondary resources and conservation of natural/primary resources.