One Plastic Bag: Isatou Ceesay and the Recycling Women of Gambia (Millbrook Picture Books)
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One Plastic Bag: Isatou Ceesay and the Recycling Women of Gambia (Millbrook Picture Books)
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Having spent a lot of time in Senegal and a little in Gambia, I can tell you that there are lots of wonderful strong women working to empower other women. I’m not sure what the numbers are now, but for quite a long time, Senegal had significantly more women representing them in parliament that we had here! (in UK). They’ve not had a female president yet but it can’t be far away! As the ugliness grows and the litter accumulates, one day Isatou finds a goat is choking on a plastic bag it has ingested. “ She knows too much to ignore it now.” One Plastic Bag: Isatou Ceesay and the Recycling Women of the Gambia". www.publishersweekly.com . Retrieved 2019-11-01.
The women’s efforts benefitted their families in several ways. They were able to sell their products, bringing much-needed money home, and they reduced the plastic waste. Isatou's endeavours were recognised in 2012 when she received the Making a World of Difference Award from the International Alliance for Women. Her brainchild, the 'Women’s Initiative Gambia,' has trained over 11,000 individuals across the country on plastic hazards and waste upcycling opportunities. Her efforts earned her the title "Queen of Recycling," a moniker well-deserved. All facts for Kids about Isatou Ceesay. Easy Science For Kids. (2018, August 8). Retrieved December 6, 2022, from https://easyscienceforkids.com/isatou-ceesay/ Mongabay Kids: What was the plastic bag pollution problem like in your community before you had the idea to recycle the bags into products like purses? Five female activists who are changing the world". Responsible Business. 2019-03-08 . Retrieved 2019-11-01.She sees families, women, and children use plastic to light up charcoal stoves: “they and their kids were directly breathing those toxic fumes. I realized we had to change this.” Abusing the environment has obvious consequences: As the saying goes, "A strong woman stands up for herself, a stronger woman stands up for everyone else." Isatou Ceesay is undeniably one of those stronger women. She's earned recognition alongside icons like Emma Watson as one of five female activists making a significant global impact. Here's the remarkable account of how she achieved this status... The women continued with their tiny business, now also making shoulder bags and cosmetic purses from plarn. Many of them were earning money for the first time, and they were able to use it to buy food to help their families through the ‘hungry gap’ – the three months in the year when there were few crops from their farmland. Their husbands noticed how their family’s lives were improving and encouraged their wives in their purse-making. The women no longer worked in secret, and soon others joined them. Within a year, Isatou’s community recycling project had grown to 50 women and she named it the N’jau Recycling and Income Generation Group (NRIGG). Today, the journey to Njau can take as little as three to four hours. It’s just one sign of the rapid changes in Gambian life. Private cars and vehicles are everywhere. The main highways are paved over almost their entire length. Halfway up the country, a beautiful bridge, completed in 2019, arcs over the Gambia River. The signs of development are everywhere, including one of the most obvious and (to outsiders’ eyes) distasteful: rubbish.
Just a few days’ stay in Njau also offers any visitor a chance to observe some of the invisible aspects of progress, such as an inspirational mindset, can-do attitude, and an environment where men and women work together. These are just some of the intangible impacts created by WIG, the organisation that put Njau on the international radar. What started with a simple plastic bag clean-up has evolved into a giant umbrella for fighting climate change, reforesting parts of Sub-Saharan Africa, supporting women’s empowerment, promoting disability advocacy, and preserving traditional knowledge and culture. She worked for the U.S. Peace Corps office in Gambia, the Swedish organization. Future in Our Hand, and as a consultant for development organizations. Isatou Ceesay- Queen of Recycling Photo Credit: Google Images As a young, female, high school dropout from a refugee family, Isatou Ceesay was seen in Njau as the least capable person to lead an organisation. “[My father’s family] are refugees from Mali who settled in The Gambia,” Isatou recalls. “Because of the culture, the community treated us as the minority and some even said, “a slave should be a slave”. It was something that I definitely worked so hard and climbed so hard to make a change for.” At the time, women were also not allowed to be leaders on any local or wider government council; even in their own homes they were discouraged from handling money or making decisions. Isatou had an idea. What if the plastic bags could be used to weave useful products, such as purses, balls, or wallets? She figured out a way to cut the plastic bags into one long strip that could be woven. But Isatou wanted to find more ways to share her knowledge and help people in her village. In 2000, she got a job as a language and culture helper with the Peace Corps and, through this, she helped to secure funding to build a skill centre in N’jau, where the women could meet and work together. Here they could learn about the importance of caring for their environment and about the dangers of burning plastic. Isatou started to teach classes on subjects such as gardening, soap making and tie-dying, and the women were able to sell many of the things they made. She had learned about nutrition and gave cooking demonstrations on how to prepare meals full of vitamins and minerals to keep their children healthy.
Next generation
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 men did not like to see the women working beneath the tree. Women were expected to take care of their homes and families while the men went out to work, and these men were afraid that the women would learn to no longer obey their husbands. Isatou moved the meetings to her house, where she and her friends could gather at night to chat and crochet purses by candlelight. They worked secretly for months until they had enough purses. Then Isatou took these to a market in the city and managed to sell them all – the city women loved them because they were so unusual. Although Ceesay's focus has thus far been on Africa, she has the wider world in her sights. “Whatever country we are in, it is so important to spread the word,“ she says. “This is a big global problem, and by connecting with similar people across the world I believe we can together make a lot of changes to help the situation we are in – the sky's the limit.“ At that time, women in Gambia were not allowed to work. They were expected to take care of the home and family. At first, Isatou worked in secret. Slowly, she began sharing her work with other women who joined her. 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.
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. 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.”
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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. 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.“ The women, in those days, they were using the bags to light fires when they wanted to cook, especially during the rainy season when all of our firewood was wet. In terms of education, we are the ones who are always behind. Boys are chosen to go to school. When we conduct our training, we find women can do a lot, but don’t know who they are, or how to implement things,” she said. Bronze: Pomelo Books * Author Jacqueline Woodson * Papa Lemon Books * Goosebottom Books * Author Gleeson Rebello * ShoutMouse Press * Author Mahvash Shahegh * China Institute.org * Live Oak Media
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