A three-part Guzangs series on the secondhand clothing trade and the African economies absorbing it.
An estimated 15 million used garments enter Ghana every week, most of them shipped from the UK, the US, and China, and a global secondhand trade now worth more than five billion dollars a year treats the continent as its primary destination. WORN OUT reports the chain in three parts: where the bales come from, how governments are responding, and what designers are doing with what arrives.
The series
Part I: The True Cost
The opening report locates the crisis at Kantamanto Market in Accra and traces it back to the structural adjustment programs of the 1980s and 1990s. It documents the volumes arriving in Ghana, the economics behind the trade, and the local cost of being treated as a textile graveyard.
Part II: The Government Response
Part II surveys how African governments are responding. It opens on Burkina Faso, where in early 2025 President Ibrahim Traoré banned secondhand clothing imports outright and centered Faso Dan Fani in a national industrial revival, then reads the wider pattern of resistance and reliance across the continent.
Part III: Return to Sender
The closing report turns to designers reworking the bales into new garments. It frames the work not as charity or survival but as a strategic intervention, and looks at the implications for the global fashion hierarchy.
Related coverage
The Revival: Kantamanto’s Climate Blueprint · Best of African Fashion 2025 · Fashion archive