What a scrapyard in Ghana can teach us about innovation | DK Osseo-Asare

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4.1 • 11.9K Ratings

🗓️ 16 August 2018

⏱️ 14 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In Agbogbloshie, a community in Accra, Ghana, people descend on a scrapyard to mine electronic waste for recyclable materials. Without formal training, these urban miners often teach themselves the workings of electronics by taking them apart and putting them together again. Designer DK Osseo-Asare wondered: What would happen if we connected these self-taught techies with students and young professionals in STEAM fields? The result: a growing maker community where people engage in peer-to-peer, hands-on education, motivated by what they want to create. Learn more about how this African makerspace is pioneering a grassroots circular economy.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This TED Talk features designer D.K. Osseo Asare recorded live at TED Global 2017.
0:08.0	Come with me to Agbuk Bloshi, a neighborhood in the heart of Akra named after a god that lives in the Odar River.
0:19.0	There's a slum, old Fadama,
0:22.4	built on land reclaimed from the Kole Lagoon
0:25.7	just before it opens into the Gulf of Guinea.
0:29.6	There's a scrapyard here
0:31.2	where people take apart all kinds of things,
0:34.1	from mobile phones to computers,
0:36.5	automobiles, to even entire airplanes.
0:39.3	Agua Volusci Scrapyard is famous because it has become a symbol of the downside of technology,
0:46.3	the problem of planned obsolescence.
0:49.3	It's seen as a place where devices from around the world end their life,
0:55.2	where your data comes to die.
0:59.4	These are the images that the media loves to show,
1:02.6	of young men and boys burning wires and cables
1:07.0	to recover copper and aluminum,
1:10.3	using styrofoam and old tires as fuel,
1:13.8	seriously hurting themselves and the environment.
1:17.5	It's a super toxic process, producing pollutants that enter the global ecosystem,
1:24.2	build up in fatty tissue, and threaten the top of the food chain.
1:29.3	But this story is incomplete.
1:34.3	There's a lot we can learn from Abu Bloshi,
	...

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