"When he was just 18 years old, Emmanuel Akatire traveled about 500 miles from his home in Zorko, Ghana, to Accra, the nation’s capital, to find the only work he could — sifting through vast piles of discarded electronics to find valuable scrap metal. A week’s worth of painstaking, often dangerous work, earns him the equivalent of about 60 U.S. dollars.
“I started doing scrap work around 2021 — after I lost both my parents — to provide for the rest of my family,” he told Muntaka Chasant, a photojournalist in Ghana. “There’s no electricity in my community, no development there,” he said. So he came to Accra, which has become a major dumping ground for the globe’s used electronics.
For years, a site called Agbogbloshie in Accra was one of the largest e-waste processing sites in Africa, getting 15,000 tons of discarded phones, computers and other used electronics each year. Many Western media outlets depicted the site as a public health and environmental tragedy, rife with toxic chemicals that leach into the water and poison the air. While that’s undoubtedly true, it’s not the full story, according to a new collaborative photojournalism project.
The project, called E-Waste in Ghana: Tracing Transboundary Flows, which won this year’s Fondation Carmignac photojournalism award, aims to capture both the positive and negative aspects of e-waste."
Jonathan Lambert reports for NPR October 5, 2024.
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