October 5, 20241:32 PM ET
The now-demolished Agbogbloshie Scrapyard in Accra, Ghana, once received about 15,000 tons of electronic waste each year, making it one of the largest e-waste processing sites in Africa.
Muntaka Chasant
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Muntaka Chasant
When he was just 18 years old, Emmanuel Akatire traveled about 500 miles from his home in Zorko, Ghana, to Accra, the nation’s capital, to find the only work he could — sifting through vast piles of discarded electronics to find valuable scrap metal. A week’s worth of painstaking, often dangerous work, earns him the equivalent of about 60 U.S. dollars.
“I started doing scrap work around 2021 — after I lost both my parents — to provide for the rest of my family,” he told Muntaka Chasant, a photojournalist in Ghana. “There’s no electricity in my community, no development there,” he said. So he came to Accra, which has become a major dumping ground fo..