In a shady room of a tin roof house five young women are sat on the floor surrounded by rubbish. One of them is precisely cutting a folded plastic bag so that it unravels into a long strip, which she twists and threads through the eye of a crochet hook. In just a few minutes a delicate, shiny blue chain appears that, in two days, will become a vibrantly striped handbag.
Another girl is threading together a bunch of hoops from old bicycle inner tubes to make jewellery. They are apprentices of a community recycling project that is believed to be the first of its kind to provide an alternative to burning household rubbish in the Gambia. Outside of the concentrated tourist resorts in the capital Banjul and a few other urban areas, municipal waste collection does not exist in Africa's smallest country.
This is a common story across the developing and emerging world. According to the United Nations Environmental Programme, around 3. In the Gambia this is evident in festering roadside ditches and blocked drains and in the acrid, back of the throat taste of burning rubbish. The environmental health hazards linked to the uncontrolled burning of plastics and the harmful pollutants released are well-evidenced, they include cancer, respiratory illness, and damage to reproductive and mental functions.
One woman's quest to educate people in how to avoid these hazards led to the formation of the Women's Initiative the Gambia WIG. The project began as a Peace Corp initiative in , and was taken forward by original group member Isatou Ceesay, who is now WIG national coordinator.
WIG was registered as a non-profit organisation in and has become increasingly enterprising over the years with the development of a training programme that aims to equip young women with environmental and income generating skills, as well as working with communities to disseminate the benefits of re-using and recycling waste.
