One Plastic Bag: Isatou Ceesay and the Recycling Women of Gambia (Millbrook Picture Books)

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The initiative’s director, Isatou Ceesay, who recently completed a tour of the US promoting her children’s book on recycling, passionately believes that waste reprocessing offers women a route to economic empowerment. It is women who are in charge of waste and they are dedicated to their communities, and can really contribute a lot Isatou Ceesay, Women's Initiative – The Gambia

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. Students could explore the country of West Africa or the city of Gambia and learn more about its culture, its people, etc. One Plastic Bag would be a great resource as a springboard for Earth Day activities or a school wide venture into a community action project. Other smaller scale activities include: As a multimedia storytelling platform, 'Climate Heroes' is dedicated to producing compelling documentaries that spotlight the valiant efforts of individuals who are steadfastly combatting environmental challenges and mitigating the impacts of climate change. 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.”The movement began in 1997 by Isatou and four other women, the N’Jau Recycling Center, in her native village in the northern Gambia. In the beginning, the movement had a mission to educate their village colleagues about the need to reclaim garbage and recycle plastic, rather than letting the garbage accumulate behind their homes. You only have to type Ceesay's name into YouTube to see the impressive speed and skill with which she can turn supermarket bags into fashionable purses. She is able to produce two and half purses everyday, and believes that doing so has helped saved numerous lives in her village. “If you leave it in the environment, people will burn it to light fires and get cancer and other incurable diseases,“ she tells me. “Donkeys and cows will also eat the plastic and die because they cannot digest it.“

Her initiative aims to correct this by providing women with the training, funding and capacity they need for their projects, and offers to help them with their business ideas. “We tell them how to price their products, how to add value, how to do marketing, and everything in between.“ Remember, if you’re planning a trip to the Gambia, West Africa—ask your tour operator for the unique chance to meet the women of Njau and stay in the village. Women’s Initiative Gambia (WIG) began as a small, environmental enterprise. Isatou Ceesay and collaborators began recycling discarded plastic bags through crochet, taking trash and turning it into useful products, such as ladies’ bags, purses, balls, and wallets. As the endeavor grew more successful, they formed local women groups and trained the groups on processing waste plastic into long stripes which could then be woven into useful products. The women were able to sell these products, bringing in much-needed money, and at the same time helping reduce plastic waste in their community.Silver: Lee and Low Books * Chronicle Books * Capstone Young Readers * Tuttle Publishing * NY Media Works LLC/KidLit TV Isatou Ceesay was born in 1972 in a small village in Gambia, Africa. When she was a child until she was a teenager, she used a woven basket to carry goods to and from the market. When the basket broke, she took a plastic bag and started using it. She likes how strong and light the plastic bag was.

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). After the reprocessing sessions, the community recycling project provided a week’s training to help participants form their own businesses or social enterprises. The idea is that this knowledge will cascade through the communities, with women encouraged to organise their own training events after completing the course.The plastic was flying everywhere. What normally people did was just to burn the plastic bags to be able to get rid of the pollution. Otherwise, our animals, they will come across the bags and they will eat them. And when they eat them they will die and then we would lose a lot of income out of that. In keeping with the spirit of the project, the trainees decided to call themselves Fay Fengo Nafaa-Siyata, which means “making waste useful” in the Mandinka language.The training gives hard-working women another option as they struggle to earn enough money for their families. Today, from the five [original] women, we are supporting 75 communities, and more than 5,000 women and youths directly who benefit from our organisation,” Isatou proudly states. “If you have a few people who believe what you believe, you can make a big impact. So, we are calling the whole world to come, and we join together to build the next generation.” It is rare to find a children’s book with such an important message about our environment, that is set outside the US, and is illustrated so beautifully! One Plastic Bag: Isatou Ceesay and The Recycling Women of The Gambia is the inspirational, true story about littered plastic bags and the woman who stood up and transformed her community. It is the perfect book to introduce environmental topics to kids like recycling, and also teaches that even one person can make a difference. The story begins on a walk in Njau, Gambia. Isatou Ceesay was named Queen of Recycling when she started the recycling movement in Gambia called: One Plastic Bag.

Really fascinating blog and a story well worth telling! Wonderful that Luke offered his photos free to promote your initiative. Isatou’s sister had taught her how to crochet, and this gave her an idea for how to upcycle the plastic bags that were causing so many problems – changing them from waste into something valuable. She would turn them into purses that could be sold to make money. Isatou persuaded five friends to join her to form a new women’s group, and together they collected bags from the rubbish pile, washed them and dried them out. Then, that first afternoon beneath the tree, they carefully cut each bag into a long continuous thread of plastic several centimetres wide – called ‘plarn’, or plastic yarn. With this, they started to crochet small purses for coins, using different coloured plarn to add pretty patterns. It took eight hours or more to make one purse and it used up around 10 plastic bags. The women were delighted with what they had made. That trust and partnership led them to ultimately settle on an idea to wash and dry the bags, then cut them into strips of ‘plarn’ to be woven into recycled coin purses. Their first attempts were rough but, as time went on, they improved their product and peddled it to locals, volunteers and tourists. It was a humble beginning; the town’s residents and even Isatou’s own family pleaded with her to stop cleaning up waste, which was considered embarrassing, shameful and dirty work.And Isatou didn’t stop there. She and her friends have used some of their income to fund a community vegetable garden, which raises money to send orphaned children to school. International markets When we learn as mothers, we can teach our children how to have a better life. Not everyone can work in an office. This is something you can do for yourself, and your family will grow up with this system.”