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

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Isatou grew up in N’jau with two sisters and a brother. Her parents were farmers. As a girl, Isatou used bits of waste, like scraps of cloth and wood, to make dolls and other toys. This made her popular with her friends because children in her village didn’t have many things to play with. She was a bright girl who loved learning and always came near the top of her class. Sadly, her father died when Isatou was just 10 years old and her mother was left to support the family alone. Isatou desperately wanted to go to high school, but her mother couldn’t afford to send her. She needed Isatou to work to bring money into the home. This wasn’t unusual; in the Gambia an estimated 75 per cent of children do not have access to a proper education. 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). 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. Other people in Gambia saw the same benefits in plastic bags. Soon, people began using the bags by the thousands. The problem was that they didn’t reuse the bags. They simply threw them on the ground. In Africa, women throw the family’s trash behind their homes so plastic bags often went there too.

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 On YouTube there is a video of Isatou Ceesay showing how to make the purses with recycled plastic bags. This could be viewed and then the students could make their own. This would be most appropriate for Grade 4 students (or older). CREATORS: The co-creators of this unique event are Mia Wenjen from Pragmatic Mom and Valarie Budayr from Jump Into a Book/Audrey Press. Learn more about these phenomenal ladies here.Isatou Ceesay (born 1972) is a Gambian activist and social entrepreneur, popularly referred to as the Queen of Recycling. [1] She initiated a recycling movement called One Plastic Bag in the Gambia. Through this movement, she educated women in The Gambia to recycle plastic waste into sellable products that earned them income. [2] [3] Early years and education [ edit ] 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: In the U.S., most communities have trash and recycling services that help us deal with waste. But what if there were no such services? Imagine the piles of trash that would accumulate. This is exactly the situation in Gambia, Africa. But Isatou Ceesay sees solutions where others see only problems.

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. 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.

A global target

Moreover, she spreads awareness about plastic being the worst polluters in the environment. Educating people about recycling and its effect in reducing the amount of plastic waste. She was honoured with The International Alliance for Women Difference Maker award in Washington DC, United States [4] [7] [8] 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.