* Sneak Peak * Fair Trade Recycling Documentary Transcript

Fair Trade Recycling is finally working on our own short documentary. The only purpose of giving this advance narration (we have the film already) is to solicit donations or in-kind services for editing.

Contact me if you want to help.

Ghana achieved independence in 61 years ago. The first major act of the new government was to approve construction of the Akosombo Dam, which was partially funded by the USA's Export-Import Bank in Washington DC. Americans wanted electrical power for aluminum bauxite mining. Ghana wanted electricity for the cities of Accra and Tema.

The partnership in providing electricity became part of a movement to develop Africa's coastal cities. Twenty years after Ghana's independence (1977) the African continent had over 300 television stations, and millions of Ghanaians moved from the north of the country - which did not yet have much electricity - to the capital, Accra. 

Ghana's capital city continued to grow from XX residents to XX residents in 1997, nearly doubling in size every decade, as young people moved from the farms in the North the the "city life". Young people like Olu Orga, just out of high school, usually arrived in a slum in the center of Accra.  That slum is called "Agbogbloshie" or "Old Fadama".

The population of Accra continued to grow. Cell phone towers, internet cable, satellites, radio stations, internet cafes, and other infrastructure were supported by what the World Bank called "a critical mass of users". Like the TV stations of the 1970s, these investments could never have supported themselves on sales of brand new electronics to wealthy Africans. The subscribers, the users, the XX% of households of Accra owning at least one owned TVs by 1997, made these investments possible.

They also drained the power of Akosomba's dam. By 1997, four other dams were commissioned, and thousands of diesel power generators were imported. A whole generation of Ghanaians had never known life without TV and electricity - unless they came from the far north of the country.

Poor, unskilled workers from the north have trouble finding jobs. Most of Accra was Christian, most northerners are Muslim. The languages of Accra are different from Dagomba or Hausa languages in the north. Like most slums, Agbogbloshie developed an economy around trade, recycling, and reuse. Starting in the 1960s, junk automobiles were purchased by chop shops in Agbogbloshie, and the scrappers still handle most of the XXX million cars in Accra at the end of their lives, redistributing the parts in the northern city of Kumasi, which has become the mecca of used vehicle repair for a 5 country region. Kumasi even has an automobile re-assembly plant, building cars from scratch out of parts recovered from African cities.

A smaller but growing part of Agbogbloshie's slum concentrates on recovery of used computers and TVs from the cities of Accra and Tema. Like the car parts industry that started in the 1970s, the Agbogbloshie scrapyard never imported used electronics, but scrappers like Olu Orga and his team collected them, by wheeled hand cart, after 10, 20 or 30 years or use by city residents.

Like the used automobile shop owners of Kumasi, Olu and his cousins had a dream - to make their own home town, the far north city of Tamale. He assembled cousins who were computer geeks and nerds from Africa's growing tech classrooms, and began sending them newer parts, and whole units, which he was collecting at scrap value from the wealthiest parts of Accra.

Olu and his team, Chendiba Enterprises of Tamale, represent Africa's Best and Brightest. They are the Wozniaks, the Jobs, the Musks, the Gateses of northern Ghana. They are Africa's Big Bang Theory. Africans call them "The Tech Sector".

Like the urban development associations of New York, Boston, Mumbai, and Hong Kong, Accra's Metropolitan Assembly looked at the commercial land value of the slum at Agbogbloshie. In 2000, the AMA issued a written plan to force evacuations, drive the poor northerners out of the center of Accra, and to develop office buildings, shopping malls, and industry.  That report labelled the slum - still called Old Fadama or Agbogbloshie - as Sodom and Gomorrah.

They labelled the Tech Sector "Informal".  And they labelled Olu's crew as illegal waste dumpers.

They labelled the goods Olu buys and sells as "Illegal E-Waste".

It's normal for tensions to increase as cities become more wealthy. Neighborhoods gentrify. Zoning changes. Tensions mount. Four attempts have been made to knock down the shantytowns in Agbogbloshie, the most recent in 2015.

As we said in the opening, there are two ways for a Western NGO to insert itself in an emerging market.  One is to help Africa's Tech Sector develop better ways of disposing African consumer junk, which has accumulated since the 1960s. Or to help them import newer material from responsible exporters, in a Fair Trade model.  Or let western recyclers buy back one ton of e-waste for every ton of used laptops, smartphones, and flat screens Olu's crew imports, in a "carbon offset model".

Another way is to profile Olu's team as "primitives", to describe Agbogbloshie as a lush green village far outside of Accra poisoned by dumping, as a leak in the "circular economy" that robs Big Shred companies of metals European and American recyclers want to sell. 

You can take photos of Olu's son, and use him as poster child for a campaign to boycott Africa's tech sector. You can manufacture fake statistics, telling reporters that 80-90% of the junkyard's contents were imported "days earlier", and that 80% of imports are simply dumped and not reused. You can confuse people on the Basel Convention by referring to an unpassed amendment (the current Convention allows export for recycling and reuse, but not dumping).

You can go after Fair Trade Recyclers, place GPS tracking devices in computers that 99% of the time are working or repairable. You can raise millions of dollars through a "charity" who finds the exporter - like Joseph Benson of BJ Electronics in England - and put him in prison for 60 months.

And not one dime of the millions of dollars raised will ever go to Olu's children.

Call yourself an E-Steward.

But Africans will not be silenced. For decades, African's mined the aluminum, the copper, and the lead that made the electronics. They manually disassembled and recycled the material that could not be reused. And they repaired and extended the lifecycle of electronics the West was discarding.

African's do believe in a Circular Economy.  But like Galileo and Copernicus, they don't believe it revolves around you.