Ghanaians working in Agbogbloshie. Marlenenapoli/Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain.Articles about Agbogbloshie often refer to it as “a vast, poisonous dump in Ghana” or “a global graveyard for electronic equipment”, where young people “trawl through the broken goods hoping to find something worth selling”. The purpose of these articles is unclear. To leave the reader with a sense of hopelessness? To suggest a simple, but rather unrealistic, solution of banning the export of e-waste from the west to the global south?
The unintended consequence of such portrayals is that they imagine e-waste as both informal and illegal, with unmarked trucks coming under the cover of the night to dump the electronic refuse and young hapless slum-dwellers sorting through it in the day. It is true that the conditions in Agbogbloshie are undeniably difficult, but to call the e-waste a ‘dump’ or a ‘graveyard’ is to stop a conversation about how exactly it and its counterparts in other countries of the global south operate. Two features of the economy inevitably hide unexplored.
The first fact that receives almost no attention is that all the scrap that comes to Agbogbloshie has to be bought first, not only from furtive importers of the electronic waste, but primarily from government institutions and private companies. Talk to the scrap dealers and you will soon realise that the majority have their businesses registered as companies in order to be able to participate in public tenders and auctions. “I recently bought a truck full of old motorcycles from the Ghana Police Service auction” one of the scrap-dealers told me while I was doing my research in the neighbouring slum.
