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Accra’s 3M residents dump over 1M tonnes of plastic a year—around 31kg per person. Beaches are buried, drains clogged, malaria spreads. The city relies on informal pickers to clean up the rubbish, yet their work is underpaid, dangerous, and widely stigmatised.

When Bamfo first started, neighbours called her a “vulture” and even a “witch.” Her family cut her off. Today she leads 8,000 workers in the Accra Tricycle Association. “I was an orphan like these children once,” she says nodding towards the young pickers scattered across her yard.

The World Bank’s answer? Plastic credits. Companies buy offsets and the money is used to fund recycling projects, so that polluters can claim to be “plastic neutral.” But Bamfo says it hasn’t slowed the flood of waste—or helped the waste pickers scraping by on cents per kilo.