Helpful Ghana travel info

If you are new here, you might want to jump to some of the pages first.

This page has a list of our top Ghana articles in various categories. You will find a lot of helpful and (hopefully) fun info about travel in Ghana.

This one is all about the guide.

The others are about us and how to contact us. You can see the links at the top right side.

Happy weekend and end of July!

Prizes and Thank Yous

This is a quick note to say thank you for the various emails and messages we've recently received about the baskets that we began to showcase recently, the recycling series, and also the Ghana travel guide too.

Sometimes I think no one reads this blog and then a flood of emails arrives and I realise we have one or two readers :)!

We'll be starting a whole bunch of fun stuff shortly, including inviting guest posts from you, readers, as well as prizes including the baskets you see on here and other prizes.

The guest posts theme will be "My Ghana" and is open to your interpretation. You can write anything you like, with a few limitations. I'll be posting the details very soon. The upside for you is exposure--we get 4000 visitors a month--with links back to your site. I am even creating a new page with each entry listed so new readers can find the posts easily.

So, start thinking about what you may want to write or show in images if you're interested in guest posting here.

And stay tuned for the prizes announcements! Our Ghana travel guide will certainly be one of the prizes.

Read more about the Ghana guide here.

Trashy in Name Only

I referred to an article written by Emily Bowers in the first of this series about the plastic problem in Ghana. I encourage you to read the entire article, Burkina Faso Women Spin Trash Into Exports. While the article refers to Burkina Faso, it could just as easily refer to Ghana. There’s not much difference in the circumstances she describes.


Here’s a little more of what she wrote, in case you don’t read the whole story.


Across Africa, women are becoming more involved in environmental initiatives, spurred on by role models such as Wangari Maathai's Green Belt Movement, which started in Kenya to encourage women to plant trees and expanded into other African countries.


In 2004, Maathai brought environmental activism in Africa to the forefront, winning the Nobel Prize for Peace and encouraging other women and girls to take the lead in environmental protection. She also created economic opportunity for women as she paid them to reforest Kenya.”


The women began crocheting plastic bags into dolls and they now export the dolls and other products to the USA from their cooperative in Burkina Faso, as well as selling to local tourists.


“Lamizana also showed off a washing board, formed from melted plastic and molded into a typical, if old-fashioned, board. At their booth in the Village Artisanal de Ouagadougou, their main clientele are browsing tourists, who will pay a few dollars for the smaller items and $20 or more for a large bag.”

The same type of activities have been happening here in Ghana for some years now. Trashy Bags in Accra are selling “recycled Bolga baskets” in their store in Accra made from woven, recycled plastic bags and cloth. These baskets use traditional basket making techniques but use recycled materials.

Each basket uses 170 pure water plastic bags on average, and about 1.7 yards of recycled cloth, that would otherwise be burnt along with the plastic.

You can visit their show room in Accra and buy recycled Bolga baskets and Trashy Bag’s products like shoulder bags and purses by catching a taxi to Dzorlu and visiting the showroom. Click our header image or the side bar links for directions to the Trashy Bags showroom in Accra.