Business & Enterprise
Landmark
Isatou Ceesay
born 1972
The Queen of Recycling, who turned the Gambia's plastic waste into women's incomes
Landmark is level 2 of 4 in the The Gambia Hall of Fame: a first that opened a door, or the pre-eminent figure of their generation in this country. See how the levels work.
Why they are here
Discarded plastic bags were breeding mosquitoes, killing livestock and choking gardens in Njau. She started collecting and recycling them, trained women to make sellable goods from them, and gave a village both a clean environment and a wage.
Isatou Ceesay was born in 1972 and is a Gambian activist and social entrepreneur known as the Queen of Recycling.
In Njau, discarded plastic bags accumulated along the roads, held standing water that bred mosquitoes, strangled gardens and killed livestock, and stank when burned. She began collecting them and recycling them into new products, and built the One Plastic Bag movement around training women to do the same — producing goods they could sell and an income where there had been none. The initiative has been widely copied and is the subject of the children's book One Plastic Bag.
In Njau, discarded plastic bags accumulated along the roads, held standing water that bred mosquitoes, strangled gardens and killed livestock, and stank when burned. She began collecting them and recycling them into new products, and built the One Plastic Bag movement around training women to do the same — producing goods they could sell and an income where there had been none. The initiative has been widely copied and is the subject of the children's book One Plastic Bag.
- Wikipedia — Isatou Ceesay
- Library of Congress — One Plastic Bag: Isatou Ceesay and the recycling women of the Gambia
- Lerner Books — One Plastic Bag: Isatou Ceesay and the recycling women of the Gambia
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