One Plastic Bag: Isatou Ceesay and the Recycling Women of Gambia (Millbrook Picture Books)

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WasteAid UK has offered support for The Gambian Women's Initiative, and Ceesay says it is helping to communicate her message far and wide. “I know that everyone working in sustainability is doing an amazing job, and if just 100 people read this I hope that maybe 25 can take away some benefit from what I am saying. This is my job, this is what I do, anyone that wants hear my advice is welcome – the more the better. I am so excited about the change we are all making together.“

This is the first project to train people in reprocessing techniques across the waste streams,” explained Mike Webster, the project manager from the WasteAidUK initiative, which delivered its inaugural project with the livelihood NGO Concern Universal. “There are plenty of reprocessing projects that haven’t got off the ground because the technology is out of reach for most people. We have focused purposefully on entry-level systems that can be made locally, and the waste materials that are actually here, not a western perception of what should be recycled.“It was really important to partner with a local organisation with strong community links. This is as much about behaviour change and finding new ways of incentivising waste management. Our focus groups showed that even a tiny financial incentive can make for effective collection systems, people are really interested in learning how to make income from waste.” One Plastic Bag: Isatou Ceesay and the Recycling Women of the Gambia". www.publishersweekly.com . Retrieved 2019-11-01. Other people in Gambia saw the same benefits in plastic bags. Soon, people began using the bags by the thousands. The problem was that they didn’t reuse the bags. They simply threw them on the ground. In Africa, women throw the family’s trash behind their homes so plastic bags often went there too.

Five coastal communities are involved in the enterprise, which aims to teach people about good rubbish management and, crucially, how to turn waste into wealth. Some people laughed at Isatou and her friends, telling them they were ‘dirty’ for digging around in the rubbish. Some men told her that her plans couldn’t work because she was a woman and too young to be a leader. But Isatou believed in what she was doing. She loved helping others and relished a challenge. In her family, everyone had always worked together to solve problems, and her mother had been a great inspiration to her. In the Gambia, many girls were unable to finish school because they were needed at home to help their mothers. Isatou wanted women to have the chance to learn skills and to earn money, even if they had not been given the chance to finish their education.

Other people in the Gambia think the same and see the same benefits found in plastic bags. Soon, people began to use the bag and year after year, plastic bag users in the Gambia grew.Thinking about waste as a resource, rather than just a mounting problem, lies at the heart of the first global report on waste, launched this month by the UN Environment Programme and the International Solid Waste Association.

One Plastic Bag is the story of how one woman cleans up her community, inspiring friends and neighbors to help create plastic, recycled purses, and reduce the trash in her village. These techniques are already in use in neighbouring countries. For example, the Waste to Wealth programme run by the UK-based Living Earth Foundation has trained slum dwellers in Sierra Leone and Cameroon to form social enterprises producing charcoal briquettes and plastic slabs. Isatou started the organization, the Njau Recycling and Income Generation Group. More than 100 women participate in the organization. They gather waste and bring it to a central location to be used by everyone.One Plastic Bag would be a great resource as a springboard for Earth Day activities or a school wide venture into a community action project. Other smaller scale activities include: Just a day before our interview, Ceesay was giving a training session in a nearby village to women who had sold soap for many years. The first question she asked was how many of them had seen any profit from their endeavours. The answer: none. “We calculated their expenditure, the number of products they make and the amount of money they could get, and they were all so excited,“ she tells me. “Now they have that business model forever, and the ability to stand on their own two feet independently, with their own money and a say in how they sell their products.“ As a child, Ceesay was forced to drop out of school at a young age but that did not allow anything to stop her determination to keep growing and to keep learning from the surrounding environment and still dare to take action.