The Fair Trade City campaign invites all residents of Mainz to rummage through their drawers and closets for old but still functional microSD cards and drop them off at the Mainz Environmental Store for the “Card Saver” project. A collection box is available there. We’ll take care of shipping them to the Audiopedia Foundation.

The Audiopedia Foundation is a nonprofit organization based in Germany. Its goal: to make knowledge audible so that women can access reliable information—in their own language, offline—even without a stable internet connection or the ability to read.

Worldwide, about 500 million women cannot read. In many regions, reliable internet access is also lacking. Printed brochures or websites rarely reach these women. Yet the topics are often very practical: health, pregnancy, family, agriculture, and financial matters.

There are an estimated 7.2 billion unused SD cards worldwide!

Before a card is reused, it is erased in accordance with the DoD 5220.22-M standard. DoD stands for the U.S. Department of Defense. This method overwrites the entire contents multiple times, ensuring that personal data is reliably removed. Only then are the cards reprogrammed.

If you'd like to set up a collection box at your location, please feel free to contact us. We'll provide the necessary materials.

The distribution of SD cards in Rwanda provides women with low-threshold access to important information and support. This can be a crucial source of support, especially in rural areas where medical and counseling services are often limited or located some distance away. In addition, the content encourages dialogue among women: Listening to the material together can serve as a gateway to discussing challenges, sharing experiences, receiving mutual support, and thereby developing new perspectives as well as concrete courses of action.