T HE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION MONDAY, JULY 29, 2019 | 3

World

She left home before dawn. Her four

children were still asleep in her cement

block house in Abobo, a maze of shops

and houses occupied by dockworkers,

taxi drivers, factory laborers and street

sellers.

She and a friend crossed into the up-

scale neighborhood of Angré, home to

doctors and businessmen. They tossed

the plastic castoffs of the consumer

class into bags slung over their shoul-

ders as the roosters crowed and the sun

peeked over villa walls draped with

bougainvillea.

Mariam Coulibaly is one in a legion of

women in Abidjan, the economic capital

of Ivory Coast, who make their living

picking up plastic waste on the city

streets and selling it for recycling. Now

they are lead players in a project that

turns trash into plastic bricks to build

schools across the country.

They are working with a Colombian

company to convert plastic waste — a

scourge of modern life — into an asset

that will help women earn a decent liv-

ing while cleaning up the environment

and improving education.

She sees it as a chance to better her

life, maybe even to rise into the middle

class.

“We don’t get good prices” from the

current buyers, Ms. Coulibaly said.

“This will help us.”

In the past year, the venture has built

nine demonstration classrooms out of

recycled plastic bricks in Gon-

zagueville, a scrappy neighborhood on

the outskirts of Abidjan, and in two

small farming villages, Sakassou and

Divo. The first schools were built with

bricks imported from Colombia. But in

the autumn, a factory now rising in an

Abidjan industrial park will begin mak-

ing the bricks locally.

The new plastic-brick classrooms are

badly needed. Some classrooms now

pack in 90 students, according to the

country’s education minister. The com-

pany building the factory, Conceptos

Plásticos, has a contract with UNICEF

to deliver 528 classrooms for about

26,400 students, at 50 students per

classroom.

In the tiny village of Sakassou, people

draw water from the well with a foot

pump, raise pigs and chickens and cook

over open fires. Until this year, the chil-

dren went to school in a traditional mud-

brick and wood building. The mud brick

eroded in the sun and rain and had to be

constantly repaired. But the three new

plastic classrooms could last practically

forever. The interlocking bricks look like

black and gray Legos. They are fire re-

tardant and stay cool in hot weather. The

other day, villagers used one of the

brightly decorated classrooms to hold a

village meeting.

“This is 10 times better,” said Joachim

Koffi Konan, the school director in

Sakassou.

The project would be impossible with-

out the organizing skills of Ms.

Coulibaly, president of a 200-member

women’s community association called

“The Fighting Women.” She has been

collecting trash for about 20 years, since

she was 15. Her husband drives a woro-

woro, a shared taxi.

After collecting trash the other morn-

ing, she went home to do the housework,

then returned to work at night, this time

in the vast open-air market of Adjamé at

closing time.

She and other women hunted through

dimly lit alleyways. They even picked

up the small bags of plastic used to sell

quick gulps of water on the street.

While the women wait for the factory

to open, they sell their plastic to inter-

mediaries — most are men — at a recy-

cling market in Abobo-Baoulé.

On a recent Saturday, one of the buy-

ers, a former yam pushcart vendor

named Sidibé Moussa, weighed each

woman’s plastic harvest by hanging it

from a hand-held bronze scale. He re-

sells the plastic to a factory that recycles

it into chairs, sandals and basins. Bot-

tles are often washed, filled with juice

and resold on the street.

At the recycling market, the women

multitasked, drying attiéké, a manioc

couscous, on plastic tarps spread on the

ground among the palm trees and the

mesh bags of plastic waste. Women and

children crushed aluminum cans by

hand, pounding them with the same

type of large wooden pestles used to

make fufu, a staple made of plantains

and cassava.

The country’s official minimum wage

is roughly $25 per week, though many

people earn far less. The women say

they earn $8.50 to $17 a week.

Ms. Coulibaly puts money into private

school tuition for her three school-age

children, who tell her they want to be-

come a pilot, a doctor and a police officer.

The women in the association contrib-

ute money to a fund, which is then redis-

tributed, ensuring that even a woman

who is sick will receive some income.

When they start selling to the factory,

they may be able to double or triple their

income, the company says. That’s be-

cause the factory will buy types of plas-

tic, like snack packaging and cellphone

parts, that the women cannot sell now.

Some of Ms. Coulibaly’s neighbors

have suggested that she and the other

women will be exploited. But she said

she is confident that the project will de-

liver the higher pay, equipment and

sacks that have been promised.

The project has the blessing of Kandia

Camara, Ivory Coast’s outspoken educa-

tion minister, who says it can only lift

women up.

“For us, it’s not a humiliating profes-

sion,” Ms. Camara said. “It is a job orga-

nized for them, their financial autonomy,

their dignity, family, society, and their

contribution to the development of the

country.”

The project was the brainchild of Dr.

Aboubacar Kampo, a physician who just

ended a term as Ivory Coast representa-

tive for UNICEF. He recruited Concep-

tos Plásticos, a for-profit plastic recy-

cling company with a social mission of

building housing and creating jobs for

poor people. The founders of the com-

pany, Oscar Andrés Méndez and his

wife, Isabel Cristina Gámez, agreed to

work with Dr. Kampo after visiting Ivory

Coast last year.

They were moved by the sight of

women, carrying babies, picking up

trash in Akouedo, a landfill notorious as

a dumping site for hazardous waste, and

thought they could help. “It had a big im-

pact for us,” Mr. Méndez said.

The couple moved to Abidjan in June

to get the project up and running, and

they are planning to expand into other

parts of West Africa. They expect to em-

ploy 30 people at the factory.

The first few classrooms cost about

$14,500 each, compared to $16,500 for a

cement classroom, Mr. Méndez said. He

expects the price to drop about 20 per-

cent when the bricks are made locally.

There is no shortage of plastic waste.

Abidjan produces about 300 tons of it a

day, but only 5 percent of it is recycled,

the project organizers say. Each class-

room takes about five tons of plastic

trash to build.

Dr. Kampo envisions expanding to

plastic housing for teachers and latrines

for schools. The teachers in Sakassou

share houses while their families are

housed in other villages. In Gon-

zagueville, there are 14 latrines for 2,

children and their teachers.

Before all this happened, the leader of

the Fighting Women had been consider-

ing a new line of work: selling cold

drinks.

But now, Ms. Coulibaly says, “We

think there is a future in plastic.”

Students at the Gonzagueville school in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, near classrooms made of plastic bricks. A Colombian company is helping to convert plastic waste to build the schools.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY YAGAZIE EMEZI FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Schools built of plastic trash

ABIDJAN, IVORY COAST

Recycling project turns

unending supply of waste

into Ivory Coast schools

BY ANEMONA HARTOCOLLIS

The interior of a classroom at the Gonzagueville school. There is a contract to produce 528 classrooms across the country.

Women in Abidjan have made a living picking up plastic waste on the city streets and

selling it for recycling. Now they are lead players in a project to build new schools.

Loucoumane Coulibaly contributed re-

porting from Abidjan, Ivory Coast.

Faced with a lethal Ebola outbreak

threatening eastern Africa, public

health officials are conceding that their

battle plan is failing and have proposed

a comprehensive new strategy for con-

taining the virus.

It envisions reframing the epidemic

as a regional humanitarian crisis, not

simply a health emergency. That may

include more troops or police to quell the

murders and arson that have made

medical work difficult, as well as food

aid to win over skeptical locals.

The Democratic Republic of Congo

also plans to deploy a second vaccine to

form a protective “curtain” of immunity

around outbreak areas.

The outbreak, which began a year ago

in Congo and was declared a global

health emergency this month, is now the

second-biggest in history, with more

than 2,600 cases and more than 1,

dead. It has persisted in part because of

a fierce but hidden power struggle

within Congo’s government for control

of the response, according to documents

obtained by The New York Times and in-

terviews with Ebola experts.

The country’s health minister, Dr. Oly

Ilunga, resigned this month after a pub-

lic dispute with donors at a meeting in

Geneva over whether to roll out the sec-

ond vaccine, which he opposed. The con-

tainment effort will no longer be over-

seen by the Health Ministry but by an

expert committee reporting directly to

Congo’s new president, Felix

Tshisekedi.

Dr. Ilunga was the target of a scathing

internal government report produced in

April, just as new cases began soaring

above 100 per week. The report was

written by a commission convened by

Congo’s new president, some of whose

members are now overseeing the re-

sponse.

The report said “arrogant” national

health officials had taken “an aggressive

and ostentatious attitude” when they

visited the outbreak area, renting de-

luxe hotel rooms and expensive cars

and “brandishing large dollar bills”

while local health workers went unpaid.

A spokeswoman for Dr. Ilunga called

the report “weak.” She said he had re-

signed not because of it, but because the

president had split the authority to over-

see the response between his office and

an independent commission, which she

claimed was a violation of the Congolese

Constitution.

Dr. Ilunga’s departure pleased some

donors and agencies supporting the

fight against Ebola. The United States is

by far the biggest donor. Tibor P. Nagy,

the State Department’s top official for

African affairs, told a Senate subcom-

mittee on Wednesday that Dr. Ilunga’s

resignation “may be an improvement to

the situation.”

The country is seeking $288 million to

implement its new Ebola strategy, and is

likely to get it. The World Bank recently

offered $300 million. The United States

increased its previous giving by $38 mil-

lion last week, and federal aid officials

have said they are committed to con-

taining the outbreak at its source.

The new plan may include a campaign

to win the hearts of the population in the

isolated eastern provinces by immuniz-

ing them against other diseases, treat-

ing children for parasites, handing out

food and even creating thousands of

jobs. Experts hope efforts will be made

to negotiate a truce with local militias.

The Health Ministry’s strategic plan

for the period from July to December,

written in cooperation with the W.H.O.,

has not been officially released but is cir-

culating among the donors and health

agencies, and a copy was obtained by

The Times. While it envisions a much

broader response, the plan is vague on

specifics — omitting even references to

which vaccines should be used.

By contrast, the commission’s report

in April endorsed the second vaccine by

name and called for many specific ac-

tions, like giving hot meals to malnour-

ished children. Because its main au-

thors are now leading the response, ex-

perts expect those steps will be taken.

In May, the United Nations made a

similar shift. David Gressly, the deputy

head of the United Nations peacekeep-

ing mission in Congo, was put in charge

of coordinating United Nations humani-

tarian and political efforts so that the

World Health Organization could focus

on the health response.

Even though the W.H.O. and many do-

nors endorsed the new vaccine, made by

Johnson & Johnson, in May, Dr. Ilunga

vigorously opposed using it. He said it

would confuse the populace and be diffi-

cult to administer, since it requires two

doses given 56 days apart.

To avoid confusion, it will be deployed

differently from the current single-dose

Merck vaccine. While that one is used to

“ring-vaccinate” everyone around each

known case, the new vaccine will be

used in areas further away to encircle

the hot zones with immunized people.

For example, while the Merck vaccine

has been given to Ugandan health work-

ers on the Congo border, the new one

will be deployed in Mbarara, a regional

capital 60 miles away with a big hospital

that ill patients might travel to.

Close to 200,000 doses of the Merck

vaccine have been distributed. The com-

pany has plans to produce 800,000, but

some experts fear shortages, especially

if the virus escapes into South Sudan,

which is as dysfunctional and war-torn

as eastern Congo.

Johnson & Johnson has offered

500,000 doses; the vaccine is easier to

store and has been tested for safety on

6,000 volunteers, but it has not been de-

ployed in the field.

At its core, the political struggle

within Congo pitted Dr. Ilunga, 59, who

had been a minister since 2016, against

Dr. Jean-Jacques Muyembe, director

general of the country’s National Insti-

tute for Biomedical Research.

It also was a struggle between Presi-

dent Tshisekedi and his predecessor, Jo-

seph Kabila, 48. After 18 contentious

years in office, Mr. Kabila stepped down

last year and is now a senator for life. In

December, Mr. Tshisekedi won a dis-

puted election, beating Mr. Kabila’s cho-

sen successor. But since then, he has

only slowly replaced Mr. Kabila’s cab-

inet ministers.

Dr. Ilunga, who visited the outbreak

area several times, is respected by some

Ebola experts. The head of one interna-

tional agency, speaking on condition of

anonymity to avoid involvement in an-

other country’s dispute, called him

“principled and data-driven.”

Dr. Muyembe, 77, is an internationally

respected authority on Ebola who has

helped fight every outbreak since the vi-

rus was discovered in 1976, when the

country was named Zaire.

The report by the commission led by

Dr. Muyembe accused Dr. Ilunga of

“weak governance, weak leadership

and a hyper-centralized response” that

failed to coordinate with other agencies,

including the police and army.

In addition to accusing Dr. Ilunga and

his staff of arrogance and ostentation,

the report also cataloged serious medi-

cal failures.

Jessica Ilunga, a spokeswoman for

the former health minister, derided the

report and said it “had no data” — such

as the names of health workers who said

they had gone unpaid.

She denied that national officials had

spent too much money and scoffed at

the idea that outbreak cities like

Butembo even had luxury hotels. Na-

tional officials had needed running wa-

ter and internet connections to do their

jobs, she said, while some had even slept

in tents.

Removing the body of a 16-month-old child who died of Ebola in Beni, Congo. The

outbreak has persisted in part because of a fierce but hidden power struggle.

JEROME DELAY/ASSOCIATED PRESS

The country’s health minister, Dr. Oly

Ilunga, who resigned this month.

AL-HADJI KUDRA MALIRO/ASSOCIATED PRESS

As Ebola persists,

Congo adopts new plan

Part of the approach,

which awaits funding,

is the use of a 2nd vaccine

BY DONALD G. MCNEIL JR.

Denise Grady contributed reporting.

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