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Dr. Samwel Moses Ntapanta was awarded a grant by The British Institute in Eastern Africa (BIEA) for dissemination of his PhD project in Tanzania among informal e-waste recyclers, the government and the general public.

The BIEA offers support for scholars who have recently completed doctoral research within the disciplines of humanities and social sciences in eastern Africa to return to the site of their research and present their findings to the community/ies with whom they worked, and to discuss further research potential with local stakeholders. 

Dr. Ntapanta's thesis explored informal electronic waste recycling in Tanzania. By adopting an ethnographic expedition, his thesis provides a thick and detailed ethnography of labour and value around informal e-waste recycling in Dar es Salaam. It follows the e-waste flows and trajectories, starting from the importation of electronic products, consumption and repairing practices to when devices become defunct.

The thesis then saturates at informal recycling spaces by bringing detailed encounters of reusing and repurposing of e-waste that challenge the common misconception of e-waste sites in the global south as apocalyptic wastelands. However, it also reveals knowledge and initiatives that informal recyclers adopt to protect themselves form toxic compounds embedded in the e-waste.