After having such a successful start we at Go4Recycling want to keep our promises and started the first sustainability partnership. It is a very interesting project based in Ghana that combines 
social, educational and environmental aspects. It aims at helping people to help themselves in the long run – and therefore it is a very important contribution to improve life in this beautiful country at Africa´s Gold Coast.
Background Ghana:
According to the 2015 Progress on Sanitation and Drinking Water Report by UNICEF and WHO, Ghana is among the ten dirtiest countries in the world. The rate at which heaps of solid waste is being grouped on the principal streets of the major cities, and in particular its capital Accra, is alarming and devastating. One cannot boast of Accra as a primate city due to the amount of waste the city is grappling with. Ghana’s second largest city, Kumasi, once referred to as the Garden City has now turned out to be “Waste City”.
Ghana has demonstrated impressive economic development over the past decades, attaining the status of a middle-income country. However, future growth is still threatened by its high vulnerability to climate change. This is reflected in increasing temperatures across the various ecological zones with rainfall patterns becoming less predictable, thus increasing the vulnerability of the poorest parts of the population to adverse ecological shocks. For example, we have witnessed an increased number of floods in recent years that threaten the lives and livelihoods of a great number of our people in June 2015.
In addition, the northern and coastal savannah areas often experience severe drought due to decreasing annual rainfall. This phenomenon has led to several farming activities being halted in the north reducing productivity and annual food production. Akosombo dam, Ghana’s largest dam for electrical power generation, have seen low water levels for the past years which have led to the dam not running at full capacity affecting energy output in Ghana
The „Recycle Up! Ghana“ project:
The Recycle Up! Ghana initiative seeks to further increase students’ awareness of environmental issues, to provide a better understanding of the potential adverse societal effects implied by excessive (plastic) waste pollution.
These objectives are to be accomplished through the project’s main element: a 10-day summer camp taking place during part of the school holidays. The idea of the Recycle Up! Ghana Summer Camps is to bring together students from different Senior High Schools (SHS’s) within the respective administrative region. With the support from local mentors and members of the German-Ghanaian organization “Technology without Borders” the summer camp participants go through a learning process including excursions to stakeholders and finally develop own local solutions to be implemented at their schools or university. In this way, the RecycleUp Summer Camps work as multiplicators of knowledge and awareness in waste pollution as well as incubators for local solutions in various different places.
For further information follow the below mentioned links:
https://technik-ohne-grenzen.org/
https://www.betterplace.org/de/projects/15266-gic-recycleup-ghana-2016