Visit Ghana 2020 - first impressions: Old Fadama

smog form e-waste burning at Agbogbloshie next to Old Fadama

We landed at Kotoka International Airport, Accra on Saturday the 7th of March. About an hour after we got to our appartment we got a call from Muntaka, a producer of face masks and expert on air (and life) quality in the city of Accra. He came over and, as agreed upfront, wanted to show us Old Fadama. We just didn’t know we would go this soon…

Old Fadama has a nickname: Sodom&Gomorra. This actually is a rather good description of what we saw. A sheer endless patchwork of wooden 3x4m sheds where families live in. The neighbourhood was covered in a thick mist coming from Agbogbloshie, the so called “e-waste recycling area”, on the other side of the heavily polluted river. Here they regain the metals from the e-waste, mainly by burning away the plastic and rubber coatings with toxic fumes as a result. On average people don’t get older than 40 years here.

On our first day we realised that there is a lower limit to where unibrick can be of help. We understood that we could never compete with the rents they payed for the wooden houses, nor could they afford more to live in a unibrick house. This was the cold reality on our first day in Ghana.