The orange flesh of a papaya is like an oval gash in the landscape at Agbogbloshie, Ghana’s vast dumping site for electronic waste, where everything is smeared and stained with mucky hues of brown and sooty black. A woman kneels among the carcasses of discarded computer monitors, scooping the fruit’s flesh for workers hungry from a morning’s work scavenging to eat.
If the appliances at Agbogbloshie were not being dismantled – plucked of their tiny nuggets of copper and aluminium – some of them could almost be technology antiques. Old VHS players, cassette recorders, sewing machines, computers from the 1980s and every period since lie haphazardly on large mounds in the dump, which stretches as far as the eye can see.
See photos of electronic waste dumping in Ghana here
“Electric waste comes here from all over the world – but especially from Europe,” says Karim (29) who, like almost all the scrap dealers at Agbogbloshie, originally comes from northern Ghana but has been salvaging, buying and selling at the dump for 10 years. “We get a lot of health problems here, but we manage, because we need the money.”
Last week, the UN’s “Solving the E-Waste Problem” initiative (Step), which was set up in 2007 to tackle the world’s growing crisis of electronic waste, warned that the global volume of such refuse is set to grow by 33% over the next four years. Much of it will be dumped in sites such as those in Agbogbloshie, increasing the risk of land contamination with lead, mercury, cadmium, arsenic and flame retardants.
Agbogbloshie seems chaotic, apocalyptic in places, but there is an order to the large, desolate, rubbish-strewn site. At one side, boys and young men gather in groups, picking their way through piles of old hard drives, untangling wires, and breaking up old air-conditioning units and even irons.
Abdoullaye (19) and a group of other teenage boys sit under makeshift iron shelters on the upturned cases of old PC monitors, working at a pile of e-waste with chisels and pliers and by hand.
The boys are surrounded by rows of rusty chest freezers, each one dangling a heavy padlock. Inside them, they store the fruits of their labour – piles of copper and aluminium – until the metal is bought by traders.
Ghanaians working in Agbogbloshie. (Pic: Wikimedia/Marlenenapoli)
“I came here from Tamale five years ago,” said Abdoullaye, who wears turned-up blue jeans and a blue and white striped polo shirt smeared with dirt. “I make between two and five cedis (£0.50 to £1.30) each day, and each month I send 50 cedis (£13) back to my family in the north. I would like to go back home, but my family needs the money, so I stay. We get too many problems here – sometimes I have to go to the hospital. It’s not good for us.”
Deeper into the heart of Agbogbloshie, huge plumes of foul-smelling smoke rise up from three large fires, where the dismantled items are burned to remove traces of plastic, leaving the metal behind. The fumes are head-pounding, but the men, women and children weaving in and out of the fires seem oblivious. Goats sleep deeply beside the upturned remains of a tree, now strewn with plastic rubbish.
Roles are gender divided at Agbogbloshie. Women and girls wander the sprawling site, hawking peeled oranges, water sachets and cooked food. Many have tiny babies wrapped in cloth tied tightly to their backs, all inhaling the toxic fumes. There are special jobs for children, who trawl the site with magnets tied on to the end of a piece of string, picking up any tiny scraps of metal left behind in the dirt.
In the centre of the dump, a clearing has been turned into a football pitch, and two teams are in the midst of a match. Agbogbloshie is not just a site for trading, burning and dumping electrical waste; it’s also home to thousands of people, who carry on their lives and raise their children in the midst of its filth and fumes. There are shacks dotted throughout the central area of the dump. In the doorway of one, next to a large heap of discarded computer hard drives, is a large, grubby cloth poster of Thomas the Tank Engine.
Ghanaians have nicknamed Agbogbloshie “Sodom and Gomorrah,” after two condemned Biblical cities, but its residents take a less hostile view.
“This is not a good place to live. But we don’t want the people in Europe and all those places to stop sending the waste,” said Karim. “This is a business centre, and we are using the money we make here to help our families to have a better life.”
It’s hard to know where to look in the crowded interior of the Murenju general store. The entrance is flanked by multicoloured mattresses stacked like surreal sandwiches. Rolls of linoleum flooring stand under shelves groaning with speakers, while cooking pots hang from the rafters amid the bunting of adverts for a pay-TV service.
Sally Kayoni, the shopkeeper, stands on tiptoe to be seen over a counter lined with car batteries, radios and DVD players. Yet the prime retail space on the eye-level shelf behind her is given over to small solar lamps presented in a neat row. They get pride of place because they are among her bestsellers.
“I had so many customers asking for them,” she says. Each month she sells more than 200 of the simple devices, which cost a little over £6 and when charged in direct sunlight will light a small room from dusk to dawn.
The 34-year-old runs one of the busiest shops in Bomet, a fast-growing town of four streets and clanking construction two hours’ drive from Kenya’s world-famous safari destination, the Masai Mara. With its paved roads and electricity, it is typical of east Africa’s new boom towns, servicing a hinterland of small farms that operate off the grid, accessible by dirt roads plied by motorcycle taxis.
Kayoni first started to notice the solar lamps when they were brought to the area in 2012 in a striking canary-yellow van owned by SunnyMoney, a subsidiary of the UK-based charity SolarAid.
They were initially distributed through the area’s schools, where head-teachers were persuaded to pitch the lamps to parents as a way of helping children to do their homework. One year on, a conventional market for the lights has been created and they are sold in shops.
(Pic: Patrick Bentley)
A business owned by a charity may sound novel, but rather than giving away solar lamps, SunnyMoney has deliberately chosen a commercial strategy, in the belief that this way its simple but effective technology can find an enduring foothold.
“We take a business approach because that is what this market needs,” says Steve Andrews, chief executive of the not-for-profit company. He wants to see solar technology follow in the footsteps of mobile phones, which have become ubiquitous in Africa over the past decade, thanks to a support network of retailers and services.
SunnyMoney has sold close to one million lights, making it the biggest retailer of solar lamps in sub-Saharan Africa. On average it makes a loss of 13p on each light it sells, but when the goal is to open up new markets by selling as many as possible – rather than make an immediate return – that is a sign of success.
“Philanthropy allowed us to be aggressive and pursue markets that didn’t exist before,” says Andrews, “because we don’t have to answer to shareholders seeking an immediate return.”
Some 40 000 lights have been sold in the Bomet area alone and SunnyMoney is on course to break even in the next two years, at which point profits will be ploughed back into the parent charity SolarAid. What some donors might find controversial is the chief executive’s belief that people value more a product they have to pay for than something given away.
Access to electricity Much of sub-Sahara Africa is littered with the detritus of good intentions – projects from refrigerated fish-packing factories on desert lakes, to secondhand computers – that failed to meet real needs in the communities where they landed.
Fewer than 20% of Kenyan homes have access to electricity and are therefore forced to use fossil fuels such as kerosene for lighting. Households that give up the kerosene lamps they used previously can expect to make a saving of roughly £40 a month, which can be spent on school fees, food and other goods. “Previously the money was leaving the community and going to global oil companies [through kerosene sales],” Andrews says. “Now it is going to local businesses.”
The educational impact of thousands of solar lights in once-dark homes can be measured around Bomet. Christopher Sigei, the area education officer, has been doing just that: “In the evening it has been working small miracles.”
Asked about local access to electricity, he smiles and describes it as “zero point something”. The average mark in national exams in the poorest neighbourhood, he points out, has risen from 215 to 233 in the first year since the lights went on sale.
These kinds of benefits have turned headteachers such as Stanley Rugut into solar evangelists. The beaming 58-year-old, who has sold about 6 000 lamps, drives around the area’s rutted roads in a battered old estate car with leopard-skin seat covers and a solar panel on the dashboard. “I like to charge the lights while I’m driving,” he explains.
He talks about old model S1 and S2, as well as newcomer light system Sun King, with the same enthusiasm with which smartphone owners debate the pros and cons of new brands and handsets. Rugut has been rewarded for his hard work with lights rather than cash, and his skills as a salesman have allowed him to amass dozens of the lamps.
“I have all of them, and people are always coming round and very excited to see them,” he says.
Meanwhile, back at the Murenju general store, the one thing you will not find is kerosene. “I no longer sell it,” says Kayoni. “After I started selling these,” she points at the solar lamps, “there was no one asking for it any more.”
“Dawn. And as the sun breaks through the piercing chill of night on the plain outside Korem it lights up a biblical famine, now, in the 20th century. This place, say workers here, is the closest thing to hell on earth.”
That television news report by the BBC’s Michael Buerk in 1984 framed Ethiopia for a generation as a place of famine and in need of salvation.
Almost 30 years later the country is hailed by pundits as an “African lion” after a decade of stellar economic growth.
Now further evidence of its turnaround has arrived with research showing that Ethiopia is creating millionaires at a faster rate than any other country on the continent.
Coffee traders shop for deals on the floor of the Ethiopian Commodities Exchange (ECX) in Addis Ababa. (Pic: AFP)
The number of dollar millionaires in the east African nation rose from 1 300 in 2007 to 2 700 by September this year, according to New World Wealth, a consultancy based in the UK and South Africa.
That figure puts the country well ahead of Angola, up by 68%, and Tanzania, which had a 51% increase. Zambia and Ghana completed the top five.
The study finds that the rise in millionaires has been closely tied to GDP growth, in which Ethiopia has also fared best over the past six years achieving 93%, followed by Egypt (81%) and Angola (61%).
The authors note, however, that Ethiopia started from a very low base, and its per capital wealth is still just $470, compared to $3 187 in Egypt and $7 508 in South Africa.
Andrew Amoils, a senior analyst at New World Wealth, said: “The economic and wealth growth in Ethiopia over the last five or six years has been really strong. There has been a lot of privatisation and certain sectors are growing well. It’s a huge upswing but it started from a low base.”
As in other parts of Africa, however, the growth is not necessarily shared.
“The millionaires are growing at a faster rate than the middle class, which doesn’t really exist in a lot of African countries, including Ethiopia,” Amoils said. “Angola, for example, has had massive millionaire growth in the last 10 years but that hasn’t spilled through to the average Angolan.”
Leading sectors But whereas much of Africa’s boom has been driven by mineral resources, leading sectors for millionaires in Ethiopia include agriculture, manufacturing and transport.
The richest Ethiopian is said to be the businessman Mohammed Al Amoudi, who divides his time between Ethiopia and Saudi Arabia, where he now has citizenship.
Workers of the Ethiopian Railways Corporation work at a construction site for a new Chinese-built railway in Dire Dawa, north eastern Ethiopia on February 26 2013. The railway will connect Addis Ababa to Djibouti’s Red Sea Port at a cost of $2.8-billion. (Pic: AFP)
A construction boom is underway in the capital, Addis Ababa, but Amare Abebaw, a social entrepreneur, said the rest of the world does still did not appreciate the country’s extraordinary transformation.
“When I go home and watch TV I still see the famine from the 80s and I wonder how do they still show this on the BBC when things have improved here? It is painful for us. We know it is part of our history but we want to focus on the present.”
Nevertheless, while the number of millionaires is definitely increasing, they remain a fraction of the population.
“There are a few at the top but the majority of people are at the bottom, like in other countries,” Abebaw said. “There are self-made millionaires and people are proud to know them. There are others were you don’t know where they got the money from, and suspicions may arise from the population.”
South Africa is the top African country for millionaires with 48 700 in 2013, followed by Egypt with 22 800 and Nigeria with 15 700.
Richard Dowden, director of the Royal African Society, said he had witnessed the rise of tower blocks, traffic jams and people now “walking with a purpose” in Addis Ababa.
He added: “You don’t see many Ethiopians in flashy cars, like you do with Luanda or Lagos [citizens in their respective countries]. Flaunting your wealth is not part of the culture.”
The Ethiopian government claims credit for the growth but is criticised as authoritarian by human rights groups; there is only one opposition MP.
In a recent blog post, Dowden noted that the former prime minister Meles Zenawi once observed: “There is no connection between democracy and development.”
I was born and raised in Dar es Salaam. We locals call our city Bongo – a Swahili slang for brain, and you need a sharp one to survive here.
My mother saved her civil servant salary for about three years to build the house I grew up in. For most of my life, I’ve lived with her in Changanyikeni, a peaceful suburb where everyone minds their own business. Apart from a lack of water in the suburb – we had to fetch some from the university block – Changanyikeni was a pleasant place to call home.
But after years of comfort, I felt like I needed a place of my own. I had spent three months in South Africa living by myself. During that time, independence grew on me – there was no one to answer to about my whereabouts or why I was out late or didn’t want to eat dinner.
And so, at the age of 28, I decided to move out and find a place to rent in Dar es Salaam.
I gravitated towards the suburbs of Sinza, Mwenge, Kinondoni and Kijitonyama, which are coveted among young Tanzanians living on their own. They are close to the city centre and offer plenty of entertainment in the form of bars, night clubs and shopping malls.
(Pic: Flickr / hownowdesign)
My first step was to find the right connections. The renting business in Dar is not exactly conventional. It’s dominated by middle men who connect potential tenants with landlords. You’ll find them every morning lurking around the suburbs, waiting for house-seekers to arrive so they can start pitching.
Most of them are good liars. They will wax lyrical about the perfect house, convince you to view it, and when you do, you’ll realise what an exaggeration “in good condition” and “lovely views” can be. And for every house you walk into, you’ll need to dish out at least $7 to the middle man as a “showing fee”.
I was first taken to Sinza, a middle class suburb full of bachelors and newlyweds who fork out a hefty USD 200 for a 2-bedroom house and at least USD 50 more for utilities. It is a nice suburb but I did not see myself living there. There is a bar, grocery store or night club after every two houses; it’s a party from Monday to Monday. Young people prefer Sinza since they do not have to drive out to have a drink; it can be found just next door.
My next option was Kinondoni but one of the middlemen told me to be very careful since all sorts of dark deals went down here. Drug dealers and prostitutes operate in this area, and the rent prices also put me off: USD 250 to USD 300.
A friend of mind suggested I try the suburb where he lived – Mbagala. Rental prices are very cheap here. For 70 USD a month, a fully fenced housed could be yours to live in.
He invited me to stay over at his place to get a feel of the suburb. The next morning I saw commotion at the bus stand near his house. People were fighting to board the bus to get to work in time. Some were even climbing in through the windows. One man complained he’d never occupied a seat on the bus for the past three months since it’s always overcrowded as people fight to get to work on time. With that, I immediately crossed Mbagala off my list.
After months of hunting for a place of my own, I realised that every suburb has its own drama. I ended up getting a one bedroom house in Kinondoni, away from the shady streets, for USD 150 per month.
I was relieved that my months of hustling were over – but I was also broke. Landlords in Dar es Salaam don’t accept one month’s rent. You need to pay six to twelve months’ rent upfront. If the house you’re renting has damages, the landlord will ask you to organise and pay for the repairs. The money will be deducted from the next month’s rent – or so they say.
I won’t be moving again anytime soon. Independence certainly comes at a cost but I didn’t expect it would involve this many people or so many dollars.
Erick Mchome is a former features writer for The Citizen newspaper in Tanzania. He is the 2011 David Astor Award Winner and worked at the Mail & Guardian between September and December 2011.
Djité Sekou (32) smokes as he passes his nights guarding one of the many high-rise apartment buildings in Dakar, Senegal. It has been eight years since his first cigarette – a Monte Carlo from Morocco – and when money is available he goes through 20 to 30 per day. It is an addiction that can cost him up to a quarter of his monthly income.
Like most smokers in Senegal, he rarely buys a full packet, preferring to purchase cigarettes individually – a sales strategy tobacco companies employ to ensure that even those with limited means are able to afford their daily nicotine.
“If my pocket is heavy, I buy the full packet,” explained Sekou. “If my pocket is empty, I buy four Excellence [cigarettes] at 100 [CFA] francs [US$0.20].”
Sekou is one of a growing number of smokers across Africa. While reliable, up-to-date figures are unavailable, the 2007 Global Youth Tobacco Survey estimated that up to 20% of Senegalese boys and 10% of girls aged 13 to 15 used tobacco products – a number believed to be much higher today.
Oumar Ndao, Senegal’s focal point for tobacco control at the Ministry of Health, says, “This is due to extremely weak legislation that, apart from prohibiting television advertising, demands no restrictions.”
Tih Ntiabang, Africa co-ordinator of the civil society Framework Convention Alliance, based in Yaounde, Cameroon, says advertising focuses “on two groups of people – the youth and women. For the youth, they portray smoking as cool. For women, if you smoke you are emancipated.”
In Senegal, there are almost no restrictions on smoking in public places, and warning labels on packets are small.
The exception is the holy city of Touba, where smoking has been banned for religious reasons since 1980 (15 years before the US State of California enacted its ban on smoking in enclosed workplaces).
Yet with Senegal’s Parliament due to vote on new anti-smoking legislation, the rest of the country may soon follow suit.
If passed, the law would ban all tobacco advertising, restrict smoking in public places, and demand health warnings that cover 30 percent of all cigarette packaging.
Ndao believes that, even if the law could be strengthened further, this would be a “major step forward” and “endow Senegal with one of the strongest [such] laws in the region.”
(Pic: Flickr/Gaffri)
Weak tobacco control continent-wide With the largest proportion of young non-smokers and the weakest tobacco controls of any other continent, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO), Africa is a lucrative market for cigarette marketers.
Just five African countries have comprehensively banned smoking in public places, according to WHO, while nine – Chad, Eritrea, Ghana, Guinea, Kenya, Madagascar, Mauritius, Niger and Togo – ban all tobacco advertising. Only four African countries – Madagascar, Mauritius, Niger and the Seychelles – meet WHO recommendations for health warnings on packaging.
“In a number of places, there is no legislation at all,” said Ntiabang. “What is really driving this is the tobacco industry strategy to recruit new smokers.”
Yet even where laws do exist, enforcement is a major problem. Senegal’s Ministry of Health has banned smoking in all health centres, but according to the government’s own report to WHO, this has had “no practical impact in reality”.
WHO estimates that, globally, tobacco kills six million people per year, a figure that, without action, could rise to eight million by 2030, with 80% of deaths occurring in low- and middle-income countries.
Taking on the tobacco industry Many health advocates believe the tide is turning, however, with Kenya, Mauritius, Seychelles and South Africa all having introduced tighter tobacco control laws in recent years. Ntiabang believes these are symptoms of “a changing trend” – but one under threat by the tobacco industry.
The 2013 WHO global report on tobacco use accuses the industry of trying to influence public health policy, exaggerating its economic importance, manipulating public opinion, fabricating support from “front groups”, undermining proven science and intimidating governments with litigation.
“Tobacco industry interference is the number one problem we have in Africa, especially in countries that are in the process of elaborating legislation,” Ntiabang adds. “The tobacco industry interferes in every single stage of this process.”
A WHO official IRIN interviewed agreed: “Every single country in Africa where there is proposed legislation, you find them there.”
According to Article 5.3 of the WHO’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, tobacco companies are not supposed to be involved in shaping health policy. But the official said many countries have been swayed by “information given by the industry claiming that they are critical to the economy, and yet the reality is they are just profiteers and are not contributing that much to the economy”.
Senegal has been no exception, says Ndao: “The industry managed to infiltrate the process with strong lobbying of decision-makers.”
In Senegal, industry officials lobbied to soften the total ban on advertising to allow communications at the point of sale, but the government has not ceded. They also pressed to ensure health warnings need not be in picture form, said Ndao, which has been more successful. But the [Senegalese] authorities are trying to resist industry pressure and are “aligned strongly with the WHO Convention” he told IRIN.
A spokesperson for Philip Morris, which controls over 40% of the tobacco market in Senegal and owns a cigarette factory in Dakar, confirmed that the company has “”proactively and transparently” been communicating its opinions to government, “like any other industry”.
While the company “welcomes the proposal for the implementation of a tobacco-control law in Senegal”, it continues to seek amendments to “a few elements” including “the lack of a transition period, the ban on trade incentives for wholesalers and retailers, and the total ban on advertising”.
To Ndao, the incentive is clear: “The industry is losing major markets in Europe and North America, and is seeking refuge in Africa, which explains their strong presence in Senegal.”
Health impact Ahmadou Dem, surgical oncologist at Joliot Curie Cancer Institute at the Dantec hospital in Dakar, is already seeing the consequences of smoking. He has noted an increase in cancers of the lung, larynx, pharynx, bladder and pancreas.
If nothing is done, the future could be more worrying still, he said. “It will be a catastrophe for our country’s health and economy, because our human and financial resources are limited and cancer care is costly.”
Dem adds that while facilities to treat cancer do exist – offering surgery, radiation therapy and chemo therapy – they remain “largely inaccessible for the majority of patients, who are poor”.
Any efforts to reduce smoking rates in Senegal must include an “ongoing anti-smoking campaign at schools, in businesses, and in the media,” he told IRIN.
Weakening the law Ndao recognises that, despite the huge public health improvements the law will bring, there is a lot more work to do.
Unless amended by members of the National Assembly, smoking areas will still be permitted in restaurants, bars and hotels, and pictures warnings – considered essential in a country where half of the adult population is illiterate – will be voluntary. Ndao believes parliamentarians will strengthen these areas of the law before it passes.
And the law will not undertake what is commonly regarded as the most effective way of reducing smoking – raising the price of cigarettes. Such a measure has to be dealt with separately through the tax system.
At just $0.80 a packet for an economy brand, and $1.20 for a premium brand, cigarette prices in Senegal are almost 10 times cheaper than in the UK and among the cheapest in the world.
Senegal has chosen not to follow the Economic Community Of West African States guidelines allowing countries to tax cigarettes up to 150% , instead abiding by the West Africa Economic and Monetary Union rules limiting taxes to just 45%.
According to WHO, a 10% price increase for tobacco products reduces consumption by 8% in low- and middle-income countries.
Two years ago, Phillip Morris created a national scandal in Senegal by reducing the price of its Marlboros by one-third. Black market cigarettes from neighbouring countries such as Gambia and Guinea-Bissau also push prices down.
Sekou believes that both a stronger law and higher taxes are “necessary”, especially for smokers like himself. “Senegal has the right to do it. Everyone wants to quit. The more they smoke, the less they eat,” he said.
“For me, someone who struggles to get 1 000 CFA [$2.00] per day, if the price went up – and my wife is next to me, my son is next to me – I wouldn’t do it,” he continued. “Even today paying $1.20 [for a packet] is a problem.
“As of today, I have decided to quit. I got myself into it, and I’ll get myself out of it too.”
