Volunteers Day Out

AMP National Volunteers Day 2014
The stories we tell of ourselves affect our lives. At AMP, it has been our intention right from the onset to tell the untold stories of Agbogbloshie and its environs. Through mapping, interviews, photography and videos, we have sought to understand this vast and intense landscape, often denigrated by popular media reportage. By these tools, we intend to encourage and improve best practises, gradually eliminate the not so good and to transform the entire Agbogbloshie into a vibrant industrial hub. This year, as we commemorate founders day ( also National Volunteers Day) be part of this, process of transformation. If you are a storyteller, photographer or videographer, a computer programmer, own a smart phone or don’t belong to any of these categories and yet are a change-maker, this is your chance. Join the Agbogbloshie Makerspace Platform for National Volunteers Day. We are making interactive digital maps, videos and photo-journals, listening to untold stories and telling it to the world. We are educating e-waste workers on health, accounting, materials and design.

Register and help us bring change where it matters most. 

Activity Outline

8:30 am – Converge at Agbogbloshie

9:00 am – Orientation and meeting with Scrap dealers executives.

9:45 am – Division into teams — spacecraft, photography and videography, mapping, interviews (storytellers).

10:00 am – Activities Begin

11:30 am – Convergence and exchange of ideas – ( in the spacecraft)

12 noon –  Refreshment & Departure

About Agbogbloshie Makerspace Platform (AMP)

Agbogbloshie Makerspace Platform (AMP) is an experiment in youth-led R&D: a collaborative project to upgrade the quality of life and environment at Agbogbloshie, the largest e-waste processing site in Ghana. In actuality, Agbogbloshie may be the center, but the Accra-Tema scrap industry generally is much more distributed and has spatially many urban processing routes and clusters.

The AMP project seeks to create an alternate convention that links Agbogbloshie’s e-waste, scrap & recycling industry with the technical know-how and social entrepreneurial framework to itself remake the landscape, over time. The approach is to design and build locally a knowledge database and set of tools for e-waste processing and digital fabrication. The intention is to empower informal sector e-waste workers and their peer groups to rehabilitate the environment of Agbogbloshie and to help green the community’s current recycling practices. The short-term goal is to design and build a makerspace for the hyper-local context of Agbogbloshie, together with an open-source technology platform to support its operation. The long-term goal is to transform Agbogbloshie’s e-waste and scrap industry into a network for more advanced materials processing and small-scale distributed manufacturing.

[Full Day] AMP Up! Ghana National Volunteers Day 2014 from Brandon Rogers on Vimeo.