Ghana Connected Photos by Robin Ingenthron

While getting news when we can from Accra's terrible flood and fires of the past 24 hours, I'm uploading photos through National Geographic.  175 dead, we pray for the families and friends of our friends in Ghana.  We are connected.

Here are 15 Photos from our Agbogbloshie trip which try to connect the dots of the "ewaste" story... the villages young men leave for the "big city". The Tech Sector which imports used electronics, connecting us, creating sustainable jobs. The cities which eventually upgrade and produce overflow "e-waste". And the young men who break motors and burn wires to pay rent in the city.

Ghana Connected:  Photos by Robin Ingenthron (National Geographic website)

This is a Slide Show with 15 of the best photos from the trip to Ghana.   Need at least 15 more, to cover the trip to Tema for example, to the shopping malls, and to the homes (and children) of the technicians who hosted me.

If you want to read more, go here.   Two more reporters confirm the "Millions of Tons" Hoax.

This place I'm standing on is now under water.  While I was there, they told me it would be under water in another month or two. It's a flood plain.  It happens every year.

These floods happen every year in Ghana:  what's news is the gas station explosion, and the government's seeming inability to plan for it. This is the story of why we now know things like that... because we are connected in ways we couldn't imagine 15 years ago.

And how would we know about these floods, how good or how bad, without the connections made between us by these Geeks of Color?  And how would we have known that the Ghana government got $795,000,000 in March 2012 to fix this drainage problem, without the internet created by these fixer tinkerer technicians?



And just to preserve a deleted thread at Slashdot yesterday... we can connect more dots in the Charitable Industrial Complex and its anonymous victims.

An anonymous reader writes:Slashdot had the news first. http://news.slashdot.org/story... During the past 12 months, there has been widespread reporting of Agbogbloshie, Ghana being the world's "largest e-waste dump" or "most polluted site on earth" or "where most used technology goes to die". A small group recyclers with ties to used technology importers in Ghana have disputed the claim for years, but the news outlets have embraced the story. In 2014, Europe gave a $1.2M grant to an NGO (Blacksmith Institute) to clean up the site, which instead vanished in a FIFA-like charade.

Now two independent reporters have verified that the site is an automobile scrapyard, (see page 78) http://digital.turn-page.com/i... where men do burn tires and auto wire, but where very very few electronics can be found. Those that are found — estimated at 910,000 pounds per year (not "millions of tons") — are generally collected in push carts from homes and businesses in Ghana. They were usually imported used from Europe, but typically kept in use by Africans for 5-15 years before being tossed to the scrappers at Agbogbloshie.

Links to the two independent stories which validate the "hoax" theory appear in today's Resource Recycling web magazine. http://resource-recycling.com/...

The Guardian http://www.theguardian.com/env...
Al Jazeera http://www.aljazeera.com/indep...
Wired http://www.wired.com/2015/04/k...
NPR http://www.npr.org/2015/01/04/...
Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
The Atlantic http://www.theatlantic.com/tec...
Scientific American http://www.scientificamerican....

In another related Slashdot story, on the 12th month since his sentencing for "e-waste export crime" TV repairman Joe Benson, a Nigerian born Essex businessman, remains in jail, despite studies finding his exported goods were more likely to work than brand new electronics sold in Africa. http://news.slashdot.org/story...
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