Yvette Tetteh makes history by swimming across the entire Volta River
Ghanaian activist and athlete Yvette Tetteh has swum the 500-kilometer-long Volta Lake in Akosombo to call attention to the awful situation of water contamination in the region and the entire country.
After decades of continuous rubbish dumping by countries in the Global North, Accra’s waterways are brimming with synthetic microfibers and material debris.
To highlight the gravity of the issue, Yvette Tetteh swam the whole length of the longest river in the nation.
The Agbetsi expedition aims to advance the body of knowledge regarding the environmental effects of secondhand textile waste on ecotoxicology.
The Or Foundation is conducting this study on how pollution from the consumption of clothing is felt in communities and ecosystems throughout Ghana, especially in Accra where tons of textile waste inundate communities.
The Or Foundation works at the intersection of environmental justice, education, and fashion development to identify and manifest responsible alternatives to dominant business models.
Looking at the number of second-hand clothing that keeps coming from the global world to Ghana, specifically Accra is alarming. In places like Kantamanto right now, they’re actually processing millions of garments of clothes and so many of those clothes are ending up as waste in Accra,” – Yvette Tetteh
Since she was 4 years old, Yvette Tetteh, a Ghanaian activist and businesswoman, has been swimming. Although she has always enjoyed swimming, she said that she had to put in a lot of practice to be able to swim as far as she can now.
Yvette said that even though she swims frequently, she always feels a little fatigued after swimming three kilometers in the Volta Lake. She added that swimming is hard in general.
According to the Or Foundation, the Kantamanto community purchases bales of used clothing for $325 million annually, $182 million of which was paid to exporters in the Global North in 2020.
Because they must use their resources to fix, clean, and recycle the clothing they get and because they must also pay sanitation fees to assist defray the expense of trash disposal, the typical store makes little money on average.
Yvette Tetteh wants to establish an impact-driven agribusiness in Ghana that boosts earnings for up to 100 local farmers and adds new jobs in local production.
A business owned by Yvette Tetteh called Pure and Just Co. connects rural farm products with domestic and international urban retail opportunities to help rural-urban enterprises flourish.
They specifically convert fresh fruit into naturally occurring, tropical dried fruit goods (banana, mango, pineapple, and pawpaw). Their work improves a local value-added agriculture industry that is underdeveloped, which in turn helps young people find stable employment, boost farmer incomes, and promote economic growth.
The cyclical climate-smart strategy boosts farmer revenue by 40% while, on average, cutting back on spoilage and post-harvest losses by 50%.
Yvette Tetteh began the last leg of the longest known swim expedition in West African history as she dove into the water on May Day.
Ghanaian-British agribusiness entrepreneur, activist, and swimmer Yvette Tetteh, 30, and the crew of The Or Foundation’s companion research vessel The Woman Who Does Not Fear will set off south for the final 100 km south of the Akosombo Dam to the Gulf of Guinea to continue their extensive research into microfiber and microplastic pollution along Ghana’s Volta River after swimming over 350 km of the river over the course of the previous month from Buipe to Akosombo.
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