What a scrapyard in Ghana can teach us about innovation DK OsseoAsare
Come with me to Agbogbloshie,
a neighborhood in the heart of Accra,
named after a god that lives
in the Odaw River.
There’s a slum, Old Fadama,
built on land reclaimed
from the Korle Lagoon,
just before it opens
into the Gulf of Guinea.
There’s a scrapyard here where people
take apart all kinds of things,
from mobile phones to computers,
automobiles to even entire airplanes.
Agbogbloshie’s scrapyard is famous
because it has become a symbol
of the downside of technology:
the problem of planned obsolescence.
It’s seen as a place where devices
from around the world end their life,
where your data comes to die.
These are the images
that the media loves to show,
of young men and boys
burning wires and cables
to recover copper and aluminum,
using Styrofoam and old tires as fuel,
seriously hurting themselves
and the environment.
It’s a super-toxic process,
producing pollutants that enter
the global ecosystem,
build up in fatty tissue
and threaten the top of the food chain.
But this story is incomplete.
There’s a lot we can learn
from Agbogbloshie,
where scrap collected
from city- and nationwide is brought.
For so many of us,
our devices are black boxes.
We know what they do,
but not how they work or what’s inside.
In Agbogbloshie, people
make it their business
to know exactly what’s inside.
Scrap dealers recover copper,
aluminum, steel, glass, plastic
and printed circuit boards.
It’s called “urban mining.”
It’s now more efficient for us
to mine materials from our waste.
There is 10 times more gold,
silver, platinum, palladium
in one ton of our electronics
than in one ton of ore mined
from beneath the surface of the earth.
In Agbogbloshie,
weight is a form of currency.
Devices are dissected to recover
materials, parts and components
with incredible attention to detail,
down to the aluminum tips
of electric plugs.
But scrap dealers don’t destroy
components that are still functional.
They supply them to repair workshops
like this one in Agbogbloshie
and the tens of thousands
of technicians across the country
that refurbish electrical
and electronic equipment,
and sell them as used products
to consumers that may not be able to buy
a new television or a new computer.
Make no mistake about it,
there are young hackers in Agbogbloshie –
and I mean that in the very best
sense of that word –
that know not only
how to take apart computers
but how to put them back together,
how to give them new life.
Agbogbloshie reminds us
that making is a cycle.
It extends to remaking and unmaking
in order to recover the materials
that enable us to make something anew.
We can learn from Agbogbloshie,
where cobblers remake work boots,
where women collect plastic
from all over the city,
sort it by type,
shred it, wash it
and ultimately sell it back
as feedstock to factories
to make new clothing,
new plastic buckets
and chairs.
Steel is stockpiled separately,
where the carcasses of cars
and microwaves and washing machines
become iron rods for new construction;
where roofing sheets become cookstoves;
where shafts from cars become chisels
that are used to scrap more objects;
where aluminum recovered
from the radiators of fridges
and air conditioners
are melted down
and use sand casting to make
ornaments for the building industry,
for pots which are sold just down
the street in the Agbogbloshie market
with a full array of locally made
ovens, stoves and smokers,
which are used every day
to make the majority of palm nut soups,
of tea and sugar breads,
of grilled tilapia in the city.
They’re made in roadside workshops
like this one by welders like Mohammed,
who recover materials
from the waste stream
and use them to make all kinds of things,
like dumbbells for working out
out of old car parts.
But here’s what’s really cool:
the welding machines
they use look like this,
and they’re made
by specially coiling copper
around electrical steel
recovered from old transformer scrap.
There’s an entire industry
just next to Agbogbloshie
making locally fabricated welding machines
that power local fabrication.
What’s really cool as well is that
there’s a transfer of skills and knowledge
across generations,
from masters to apprentices,
but it’s done through active learning,
through heuristic learning,
learning by doing and by making.
And this stands in sharp contrast
to the experience
of many students in school,
where lecturers lecture,
and students write things down
and memorize them.
It’s boring, but the real problem is
this somehow preempts their latent
or their inherent entrepreneurial power.
They know books but not how to make stuff.
Four years ago, my cofounder
Yasmine Abbas and I asked:
What would happen if we could couple
the practical know-how of makers
in the informal sector
with the technical knowledge
of students and young professionals
in STEAM fields –
science, technology, engineering,
arts and mathematics –
to build a STEAM-powered innovation engine
to drive what we call
“Sankofa Innovation,” which I’ll explain.
We took forays into the scrapyard
to look for what could be repurposed,
like DVD writers that could
become laser etchers,
or the power supplies of old servers
for a start-up in Kumasi
making 3D printers out of e-waste.
The key was to bring together
young people from different backgrounds
that ordinarily never have
anything to do with each other,
to have a conversation
about how they could collaborate
and to test and develop
new machines and tools
that could allow them to shred
and strip copper instead of burning it,
to mold plastic bricks and tiles,
to build new computers out of components
recovered from dead electronics,
to build a drone.
And here you can see it flying
for the first time in Agbogbloshie.
(Applause)
Yasmine and I have collaborated
with over 1,500 young people,
750 from STEAM fields,
and over 750 grassroots makers
and scrap dealers
from Agbogbloshie and beyond.
They’ve joined hands together
to develop a platform
which they call Spacecraft,
a hybrid physical and digital
space for crafting,
more of a process than a product,
an open architecture for making,
which involves three parts:
a makerspace kiosk,
which is prefab and modular;
tool kits which can be customized
based on what makers want to make;
and a trading app.
We built the app specifically
with the needs of the scrap dealers
in mind first,
because we realized that it was not enough
to arm them with information
and upgraded technology
if we wanted them to green
their recycling processes;
they needed incentives.
Scrap dealers are always looking
for new scrap and new buyers
and what interests them
is finding buyers who will pay more
for clean copper than for burnt.
We realized that in the entire ecosystem,
everyone was searching for something.
Makers are searching for materials,
parts, components, tools, blueprints
to make what it is they want to make.
They’re also finding a way
to let customers and clientele
find out that they can repair a blender
or fix an iron
or, as we learned yesterday,
to make a french fry machine.
On the flip side, you find
that there are end users
that are desperately looking for someone
that can make them a french fry machine,
and you have scrap dealers who are
looking how they can collect this scrap,
process it, and turn it back
into an input for new making.
We tried to untangle
that knot of not knowing
to allow people to find what they need
to make what they want to make.
We prototyped the makerspace
kiosk in Agbogbloshie,
conceived as the opposite of a school:
a portal into experiential
and experimental making
that connects local and global
and connects making
with remaking and unmaking.
We made a rule that everything
had to be made from scratch
using only materials made in Ghana
or sourced from the scrapyard.
The structures essentially are
simple trusses which bolt together.
It takes about two hours to assemble
one module with semi-skilled labor,
and by developing tooling
and jigs and rigs,
we were able to actually
build these standardized parts
within this ecosystem of artisanal welders
with the precision of one millimeter –
of course, using made-in-Agbogbloshie
welding machines,
as well as for the tools,
which can lock, the toolboxes,
and stack to make workbenches,
and again, customized
based on what you want to make.
We’ve tested the app in Agbogbloshie
and are getting ready to open it up
to other maker ecosystems.
In six months, we’ll have finished
three years of testing
the makerspace kiosk,
which I have to admit, we’ve subjected
to some pretty horrific abuse.
But it’s for a good cause,
because based on
the results of that testing,
we’ve been able to redesign
an upgraded version of this makerspace.
If a fab lab is large, expensive,
and fixed in place,
think of this as the counterpoint:
something low-cost,
which can be locally manufactured,
which can be expanded
and kitted out incrementally
as makers acquire resources.
You can think of it as a toolshed,
where makers can come and check out tools
and take them via handcart
to wherever they want in the city
to make what it is they want to make.
And moving into the next phase,
we’re planning to also add
ceiling-mounted CNC bots,
which allow makers to cocreate
together with robots.
Ultimately, this is a kit of parts,
which can be assembled locally
within the informal sector
using standardized parts
which can be upgraded collectively
through an open-source process.
In totality, this entire
makerspace system
tries to do five things:
to enable emerging makers
to gather the resources they need
and the tools to make
what they want to make;
to learn by doing and from others;
to produce more and better products;
to be able to trade
to generate steady income;
and ultimately, to amplify
not only their reputation as a maker,
but their maker potential.
Sankofa is one of the most powerful
Adinkra symbols of the Akan peoples
in Ghana and Cote d’Ivoire,
and it can be represented as a bird
reaching onto its back to collect an egg,
a symbol of power.
It translates literally from the Twi
as “return and get it,”
and what this means is that if
an individual or a community or a society
wants to have a successful future,
they have to draw on the past.
To acquire and master
existing ways of doing,
access the knowledge of their ancestors.
And this is very relevant
if we want to think about an inclusive
future for Africa today.
We have to start from the ground up,
mining what already works
for methods and for models,
and to think about how might we
be able to connect,
in a kind of “both-and,”
not “either-or” paradigm,
the innovation capacity
of this growing network
of tech hubs and incubators
across the continent
and to rethink beyond national boundaries
and political boundaries,
to think about how we can network
innovation in Africa
with the spirit of Sankofa
and the existing capacity
of makers at the grassroots.
If, in the future, someone tells you
Agbogbloshie is the largest
e-waste dump in the world,
I hope you can correct them
and explain to them that a dump
is a place where you throw things away
and leave them forever;
a scrapyard is where
you take things apart.
Waste is something
that no longer has any value,
whereas scrap is something
that you recover
specifically to use it
to remake something new.
Making is a cycle,
and African makerspaces
are already pioneering and leading
circular economy at the grassroots.
Let’s make more and better together.
Thank you.
(Applause)