chapter
05
Picture Wa, Ghana in the year 2053.
Ama’s great-great-great-granddaughter strides through a clean city heading to do some early-morning shopping. Equipped with her handy woven basket which sports the latest, trendiest patterns, she doesn’t stop to notice the tidy streets and fresh air. It’s something she can just take for granted. She is enjoying some time off from a job she loves. Like many of her young peers, she has a decent job in biomaterials, where tradition leads organically to innovation and where she is continually studying future-building topics.
Little does she know how different her life and career path could have been, how different her city could have looked, smelled, felt. If not for a group of young people in her city raising their voices thirty years before. If not for a special little project that led them to breathing new life into traditional crafts and creating an attractive and viable alternative to single-use plastic bags. If not for their belief that they could make a change, be ambassadors for a different way of thinking and behaving, a different way of viewing tradition and modernity. If not for them seeing the mounting problem of plastic pollution and stepping up to the challenge to find solutions.
This idyllic future is now a distinct possibility for Wa. And for so many other communities that are now choked with the toxicity of ubiquitous plastic use and plagues with high youth unemployment, this project can be a beacon. It can be not just an inspiration, but a guide for how to go about making the changes necessary to shape the cleaner, healthier, more prosperous and fulfilling future we all desire.
