By Minkail Olaitan Managing Editor Nigeria
A king used to be rubbish. That is the first fact, and it is not a metaphor. In Kibera, plastic that had no future is washed, shredded, melted, poured into moulds, cooled, trimmed by hand, and set on a board printed on a gunia sack. The most valuable piece on the chessboard begins as the thing a city tried to throw away. The Gift of Chess, the New York charity founded in 2020 by Russell Makofsky, has made that alchemy its newest language: clean the street, employ the neighbour, hand a child a complete set, and ask the mind to do the rest.
The work started in Kenya. Kijiji Solutions already knew how to turn waste into value. Youth groups collect and sort. Pellets return from Mathare. An extruder in Kibera makes a paste that becomes knights and queens. Matching pouches come from leftover fabric. What leaves the factory is not a souvenir. It is a classroom that folds. The organisation’s own posts put the Kibera rhythm near fifty sets a day. Together with the second factory in Goma, the partnership now turns out roughly eight hundred sets a month, sent into schools, prisons, and refugee communities. By mid-August 2026, the ledgers were already blunt: well over three thousand sets from Kibera, a thousand from the DRC line under SogaChess.
The charity has named the logic without dressing it up. In one of its posts, The Gift of Chess says: “Our waste plastic chess set factories cover three key areas of impact: Economic development, Waste management, and at scale chess education.” That triad is the whole argument. A job is made where plastic normally chokes a drain. A street is cleaner because the waste now has a destination. A school receives enough boards for a generation to practise thinking in public.
Goma is not a gentle workshop. It is a city that has learned the sound of displacement. Sake sits on its western doorstep, an agricultural and trading centre whose recent years have been written by the war in eastern Congo. Through SogaChess, recycled sets have reached that doorstep as something stranger than aid: a visiting order in a place that has had too little of it. Children there are preparing for the September return to school. A board will not stop a conflict. It can still teach a child to sit, to wait, to think three moves ahead, to lose without disappearing.
Those who have lived inside the game have said as much for decades. Garry Kasparov, the former world champion who has spent years arguing for chess in schools, put the civic case in one sentence: “Chess helps you to concentrate, improve your logic. It teaches you to play by the rules and take responsibility for your actions, how to problem solve in an uncertain environment.” Uncertainty is the weather of Sake, of Kibera, of every camp that has had to invent a tomorrow before breakfast. The board does not deny that weather. It trains a response to it.
Tunde Onakoya, who directs educational outreach for The Gift of Chess and whose Chess in Slums work helped open the African door, speaks from a harder school. “Chess literally saved me,” he has said. He likes another line even more: “The greatest miracle of chess is in the innate ability of a pawn to become a queen.” That is not poetry for a brochure. It is the sentence a child in Makoko or Majidun can understand with their hands. When asked to explain the work poorly, he once answered, “I teach people how to drop weapons and pick up plastic pieces.” The factories in Kibera and Goma have made that joke exact. The pieces really are plastic. The weapons they replace are the ones a restless mind reaches for when no other tool is offered.
Canada has now entered the map. The Gift of Chess has begun its first distribution effort there, starting with five sets sent to a local community in St. Stephen, New Brunswick. Those first boards are the opening of a corridor, not yet proof that every Canadian classroom will receive a set poured in Kibera or Goma. Still, the direction is clear. Once a country is inside the movement, the recycled factory line is the cargo that follows most naturally: the same mission, now carrying the extra weight of a cleaned street. A recycled set, when it does arrive, will hold two lives at once. It is refuse redeemed. It is also the old promise of the game: that thought can be trained, shared, and passed on.
The next factory is planned for a place that already knows waiting. On 26 August, the organization wrote: “The Gift of Chess has initiated plans to launch our 3rd waste plastic chess set factory which will be located in Uganda’s Nakivale Refugee Settlement. Nakivale is one of the oldest and largest refugee camps in the world. The factory will be led by @RCAuganda.” If Kibera taught the method and Goma proved it could travel through instability, Nakivale asks whether people living inside exile can also become makers, not only recipients. The answer the project is betting on is yes.
None of this is small in ambition. The Gift of Chess was born in pandemic New York, when isolation made a simple set feel like a way back to other people. The goal remains one million donated sets by 2030. Hundreds of thousands have already moved across more than seventy countries. Onakoya’s other charge is the one the factories seem built to honour: “It is possible to do great things from a small place.” Makofsky’s own instruction stays beside it. Let each one teach each one. A set that stops with one player is only plastic. A set that teaches another player becomes a school.
There is a temptation to call this a miracle. It is more useful to call it a system. Waste is collected. Jobs are made. Boards leave the factory. A teacher, an ambassador, a volunteer sits down with a child. The child learns that a pawn has a future if it is patient. The street is slightly cleaner than it was yesterday. The mind is slightly less at the mercy of noise.
In Sake, that is not an abstraction. In St. Stephen, it is the beginning of a longer crossing. In Nakivale, if the third factory rises, it will not be a monument. It will be a room where discarded bottles become queens, and queens become lessons, and lessons become the quiet courage of people who still have to live somewhere. The planet gets a fraction of its rubbish back as thought. The child gets a board. The rest, as every serious player knows, is up to the next move.
THE MOOD QUESTION
What happens when we stop looking at something, or someone, as disposable?
A discarded bottle can become a chess piece. A chess piece can become a lesson. A lesson can become possibility.
Where have you seen something overlooked become something extraordinary?
STAY IN THE MOOD
The Gift of Chess reminds us that improving a life doesn’t always begin with something enormous. Sometimes it begins with a piece of plastic, a chessboard, and someone willing to teach the next move.
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