When Akorfa Dagadu arrived at MIT, she had a solution in mind: a mobile app to improve recycling and environmental engagement in her home country of Ghana. The project, called Ishara, aimed to make it easier for people to participate in local recycling systems while creating economic opportunities.
“I grew up in what people often call the trash capital of Accra,” she recalls. “I thought I knew what would fix it. So [my Ishara co-founders and I] built a solution — an app — behind some desk in a library … We did what I thought was market research, but looking back, we were basically asking people what they thought about our idea instead of asking how things actually worked … Implementation humbled us very quickly.”
On the ground, Dagadu encountered a reality very different than she anticipated.
“Informal networks of waste pickers and aggregators were already doing the work,” she explains. They’d developed a system that was already working, but it was “invisible, undervalued, and excluded from larger recycling conversations.”
From technical solutions to systems change
