GSR Blog Special Series #1: A Tale of Two Cedis Part One

Lili's Store

Once upon a time two cedis (the currency of Ghana . There are about 1.5 Ghanaian Cedi to

$1US) were sitting in the pocket of a street vendor named Lili. Lili had a small stall in the

provincial capital of an African country. It was the end of the day, and business had been pretty

good. The proof was these two cedi – the result of 10 hours of sitting in her “shop”! Lili sold

oranges and bananas in her tiny shop which she harvested from her family’s small farm 30 miles

away in a small village. Next to Lili’s shop, there was another street vendor selling oranges and

bananas, but Lili was not upset about their competition. In fact, in that section of the city, there

were hundreds of informal vendors, and many of them sold oranges and bananas at the same

price as Lili’s.

Lili was very happy about the sales today. Two cedis meant food on the table tonight. Her

children would each get a bowl of cassava, perhaps with a few beans in it! Unfortunately the two

cedis were not so easily mollified. They understood that Lili was living hand to mouth, and some

days, her family did not get enough to eat. They began to speak to each other about what they

might do to make Lili’s future brighter. They had heard about a cedi that hitched a ride to China

(there were plenty of shops near Lili’s stall selling cheap Chinese imports. The money to pay

for these low quality products went to the factories in China. So the cedi found it easy to get to

China, along with millions of other cedis (and dollars, euros and every other currency)In China,

the cedi made its way to an engineering firm engaged in building roads in Lili’s district. The cedi

was excited by the company’s work in Ghana – it thought it would be able to go home in

triumph, but neither this cedi, nor any of the other millions of cedi that ended up in China ever

came back. The labor for the road construction were all Chinese, the building material for the

road was imported from China, and the main beneficiaries of the road were the Chinese mining

companies that were mining minerals in Lili’s district and exporting them to China. Lili never

received a pesewa from the profits from this mining. Neither did any of the other people in Lili’s

district. however, Lili indirectly paid a heavy price for the presence of this mine in her district.

The mine had ruined a huge area around the mine by digging ore, separating the valuable mineral

from the useless rock and then dumping the waste. The mine used volatile chemicals, including

mercury and cyanide in the process of separating the valuable minerals from the slag. These

poisons gradually leeched into the water table, and the water at the village well was gradually

becoming unsafe to drink. Lili was aware that a growing number of children in her village were

born with horrible birth defects. If the mining continued much longer, the village might have to

be abandoned and Lili’s family would lose their farm.

Photography by Bert Kaufmann