Suame Magazine: A World of Opportunity

The 'Suame Magazine', a 450 acre cluster of 200,000 artisans and engineers, is where I work. Everyday I make the 20 minute trip from the SMIDO office to the SMIDO workshop and am blown away by what I see. My first day it looked like an enormous scrap yard, a landfill that expands across the horizon in every direction.

Today I took my usual route: across a makeshift wooden bridge and over a small creek polluted with garbage and oozing motor oil, I squeezed through a gap between buildings barely a foot wide, over piles of scattered orange peels, and through clouds of thick blue exhaust smoke.

But today I saw something different. Behind the noise, the smells, and the chaos, everywhere I look I see one thing: opportunity.

What else do I pass as I navigate my way through the Magazine?

I see shipping containers converted into shops selling brake pads and timing belts for imported European cars. A taxi driver is negotiating for a new side mirror that was blown off by a careless 'tro-tro' driver.



I see smoke billowing from Mr. Habib's massive home made furnace. Today he is melting scrap metal pieces (old engine blocks, broken car doors, parts of a tractor that I can't identify) to be re-cast into grinding plates for a maize milling machine - customers come from as far as Burkina Faso and Cote d'Ivoire for his quality product.






I hear oil sizzling and ladies chatting as lunch is prepared at a corner 'chop shop'. I think that's tilapia I smell frying. Yum.

From the corner of my eye I see bright bursts of white light. A man in coveralls (more oil-stained than blue) is spot welding a metal plate to the gutted wreckage of a Greyhound bus. A man opposite him is sanding the rear bumper. In two weeks time this bus will be rebuilt, painted, and sold to a customer from Nigeria.

This 'scrap yard' is the largest industrial estate in Sub-Saharan Africa. Twelve thousand shops and businesses, two hundred thousand workers, each earning an average $5 a day. In excess of one million dollars flows through the Magazine each day.

But back to poverty for a moment. The Government of Ghana estimates 25% of the artisans here live in poverty. Opportunity is everywhere, but a lack in living conditions is clear to see as well. I often see a group of children playing football near piles of trash, or a toddler crawling across dirt that's been soaked by decades of oil spills. It hits you just what life must be like for some of these people, despite the hard work twelve hours a day, six days a week.

The Suame Magazine Industrial Development Organization (SMIDO) is the organization I work for. SMIDO is committed to turning the Suame Magazine into a technologically advanced, world class industrial estate, comparable and competitive to those of East Asia. How are we going to do that? How does that relate to that toddler I saw? What impact is it going to have more broadly on the people of the Magazine?

Stay tuned.! ;)

UPDATE: An interesting point was brought up by a loyal reader, Annelies, regarding safety in the Magazine. This got me thinking quite a bit about some of the challenges faced in the workshops, and the ethical questions that an engineer must deal with. I encourage you to read the comments section of this post and challenge you to share your opinion!