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At dawn in Accra, Ghana, Lydia Bamfo (51) sets out to collect plastic waste. For 25 years she’s battled the tide of rubbish overwhelming her city. Now she says the World Bank’s “solution” has done nothing to help workers like her. 🧵

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.

Projects like the Asase Foundation, funded by the World Bank, turn sachets into pellets and “plastic lumber”. But picker leaders say these schemes sideline their work leaving the real problem—unchecked plastic production—untouched. One researcher calls credits a “game of greenwashing”.

Despite it all, Bamfo built Nkosoo Waste Management (“progress” in Twi), where she shelters young waste pickers. “It is important work we do,” she says. “We clean the city.”