Kantamanto: the market that absorbs the world's unwanted clothes — including millions of items from the UK

Kantamanto: the market that absorbs the world's unwanted clothes — and what happened when it burned

*Published by Samantha, founder of Teddy Locks*

On the first day of 2025, a fire swept through Kantamanto Market in Accra, Ghana. It destroyed more than 60% of the world's largest secondhand clothing market in a matter of hours. Over 10,000 people lost their livelihoods overnight — traders, tailors, upcyclers, and the women known as *kayayei* who carry bales of clothing on their heads through the market's labyrinthine alleys.

Most people in the UK had never heard of Kantamanto. They should have.

Because Kantamanto is where a significant proportion of the clothes you donate ends up. Understanding what that market is, why it exists, and what it has become tells you more about the real economics of sustainable fashion than almost anything else.

Where Kantamanto came from

The market's roots go back to Ghana's time as a British colony.  Ghana had been the British Gold Coast Colony since the 1870s, and became the first sub-Saharan African country to become independent, in 1957.

But in approximately the 1940s used clothing from the UK began arriving in West Africa — partly as genuine charitable distribution, partly as a commercial solution to the overflow of donated goods that British charitable organisations couldn't sell domestically.

For decades, it worked well. The clothing arriving was high quality. British-made garments, worn but durable, were genuinely desirable in Ghana, where the cost of new clothing was high. The market grew into a sophisticated economy — traders developed expertise in grading, sorting and reselling, and Kantamanto became a thriving hub at the centre of Accra's informal economy. The local nickname for the imported garments — *obroni wawu*, which translates roughly as "dead white man's clothes" — was affectionate rather than critical. There was real value in what arrived.

Before this trade, Ghana had a genuinely substantial textile industry. At its peak it had 16 major textile manufacturers and 138 medium-to-large garment manufacturers employing over 25,000 people. It was producing wax prints, batik, fancy printed cloth, and most significantly Kente - a hand-woven ceremonial cloth woven in silk and cotton carrying significant cultural meaning. Ghana was also growing its own cotton and had ginneries processing it domestically — a vertically integrated industry from fibre to finished garment.

Ghana's textile and garment sector employed over 25,000 people at its peak. By 2016, that had fallen to around 2,000 — a loss of over 90%, driven first by economic collapse in the early 1980s and then by IMF-mandated trade liberalisation that removed the tariff protections keeping domestic manufacturers viable against imported goods and cheap secondhand clothing. But for several decades the trade was, on balance, providing affordable clothing to people who needed it.

Then fast fashion changed everything.

What broke the system

The volume arriving at Kantamanto today is unmanageable. Ghana imports approximately 225,000 tonnes of secondhand clothing every year — around 15 million individual garments every week. In one recent year, the UK alone sent 57,000 tonnes to Ghana, more than to any other country apart from the UAE. That is an estimated 250 million garments — roughly four for every person in the UK.

The UK is the third largest exporter of used textiles globally, after the US and China. The top destinations are the UAE first — which functions as a re-export hub, not a final destination — then Ghana, Pakistan (another sorting and re-export hub), and then Kenya, India, Malaysia, Angola, and Eastern European countries like Poland which sort and re-export within Europe. So our unwanted clothes are perdominantly sent to sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and Southeast Asia.

But volume isn't the only problem. Quality has collapsed.

As Western consumers bought cheaper clothes more frequently and discarded them faster, the average quality of donated clothing deteriorated. The clothing arriving at Kantamanto now contains a far higher proportion of damaged, stained, worn-out or simply worthless items than it did twenty years ago. Traders at Kantamanto buy bales blind — sealed 55-kilogram containers whose contents they cannot inspect before purchase. They pay for the bale. They pay for the shipping. They discover what's inside only after it arrives.

Up to 40% of each bale is unsellable. The trader absorbs that loss entirely. With thin margins and a risky supply, many are trapped in debt cycles that are difficult to escape. The UK's export of used clothing to Ghana rose 77% over a decade, while the value per kilogram fell by 15% — more clothes arriving, worth less each year.

But aren't we sorting donations in the UK?

It's cheaper to export the problem than to solve it domestically.

The UK can sort less than half of the textiles it collects, according to the UNECE report. The Textile Recycling Association has explicitly warned that UK processing plants are reaching capacity. Sorting is labour-intensive — skilled human graders, not machines — and the economics only work if the output has value. A stained polyester blouse has no value in the UK resale market, very low value as insulation feedstock because of its blended fibre content, and marginal value as industrial rags. Exporting it to Ghana means someone else — the Ghanaian importer, then the trader who buys the bale blind — ends up holding that worthless item and absorbing the cost of its disposal.

Some UK sorters do genuinely remove damaged items before baling. Others don't, because the economics reward volume over quality. There is no regulatory requirement to certify the quality of exported bales.

Until that changes, the economics will continue to favour export over domestic sorting, and the cost will continue to be borne by whoever opens the bale at the other end.

Who is actually paying for this?

This is the question worth sitting with.

When you donate clothes to a charity shop or clothing bank, the charity sells what it can to the public. The rest — the majority — is sold in bulk, by weight, to commercial textile merchants. Those merchants sort, grade and export. They sell to Ghanaian importers, who sell to market wholesalers, who sell bales to individual traders. At every point in that chain, someone is making a margin.

UK and European charities need the revenue from bulk textile sales to fund their charitable operations — Oxfam earned $2.5 million from all its recycling in 2024/25. Commercial textile merchants need the margin from sorting and exporting. Ghanaian importers need the supply to serve a domestic population where, according to the Ghana Used Clothing Dealers Association, secondhand clothing meets the clothing needs of approximately 95% of the Ghanaian population — because new clothing is simply not affordable for most people. And the 30,000 traders, tailors and upcyclers at Kantamanto depend on those bales for their livelihoods.

It's a supply chain that provides affordable clothing in Ghana, revenue for UK charities, employment for sorters across Eastern Europe and South Asia. The problem is that fast fashion has flooded that supply chain with so much low-quality, unsellable material that the people at the end of the chain — the Ghanaian traders — are absorbing costs and risks that the system was never designed to place on them.

The Ghanaian trader at the end of the chain pays for the bale. They paid for the shipping. They take the financial risk. The Western charity that began this chain has already been paid.

This is not a criticism of charities specifically. They are operating within a system that generates far more donated textiles than any domestic market can absorb. Oxfam has publicly acknowledged the situation, describing it as "an imperfect and complicated system." But it is worth being clear: the secondhand clothing trade is not a charity. It is a global commercial supply chain worth approximately $5 billion annually, and Kantamanto sits at its most financially precarious end.

 

What Kantamanto actually is.

Despite everything — the volume, the waste, the debt — Kantamanto is also something genuinely remarkable.

30,000 people work there. In a city where formal employment is scarce, the market is a significant economic institution. The traders, tailors, upcyclers and kayayei who work there have developed skills and community structures that represent exactly the kind of circular economy the sustainable fashion industry talks about but rarely achieves. Items are repaired, altered, reworked, resold. A shirt that arrives with a torn collar gets a new one. A dress gets taken in. Fabric from genuinely unsellable items is cut into cleaning cloths, mop heads, insulation material.

The Or Foundation — a nonprofit working directly within Kantamanto — documented 25 million pieces of secondhand clothing being recirculated through the market every month through resale, reuse, repair and remanufacturing. That is genuine circularity, achieved by hand, by 30,000 people working in difficult conditions, absorbing the cost of the Global North's overproduction.

The Or Foundation was founded by Liz Ricketts and Branson Skinner and has operated in Kantamanto for fifteen years. Their work includes direct financial relief to traders, waste collection infrastructure, upcycling business development programmes, and advocacy at European and US policy level for what they call Globally Accountable Extended Producer Responsibility — the principle that the companies producing fast fashion should bear some financial responsibility for what happens to it at end of life, wherever in the world that end of life occurs.

The fire, and what came after.

On the night of 1 January 2025, a fire started in the market. By morning, 10 of the 13 sections had burned. One person died. Hundreds were injured. Traders who had spent decades building their businesses lost everything in hours. William Kesse, one trader whose family has worked in Kantamanto since his grandmother was among the first to settle there in the early 1980s, had brought goods worth over 30,000 Ghanaian cedis — roughly £2,000 — to his four shops on 31 December. By 2 January, all of it was ash.

The Or Foundation committed $1 million to emergency relief within 24 hours, eventually distributing over $1.5 million in direct payments to more than 9,000 affected community members. They coordinated debris clearance, medical support, fire extinguisher installation across the market, and electrical safety improvements. Six months later, the market structure had been physically rebuilt. The infrastructure improvements — fire lanes, unified electrical supply, trained security — represent the first systematic safety investment Kantamanto has had.

The global fashion industry, whose overproduction created the conditions that brought millions of garments to Kantamanto in the first place, contributed comparatively little to the recovery.

What this means for you.

The Korle Lagoon near Kantamanto — once a place where people fished and swam — is now one of the most polluted bodies of water in the world. The shores are lined with discarded textiles. Synthetic fibres enter the Atlantic Ocean from the lagoon's outflow. The clothing burning in open pits around the market releases toxic chemicals into the air over communities where children play.

This is not happening because Ghanaians are careless with waste. It is happening because the volume arriving exceeds any reasonable capacity to process it, and no country has the infrastructure to safely manage 225,000 tonnes of textile waste per year arriving from outside its borders.

The practical implication for anyone in the UK thinking about clothing disposal: donate wearable, good-quality items, because those are the ones that have a genuine chance of being resold and worn by someone. Damaged or worn-out items donated in large quantities are not helping — they are adding to a bale that a trader in Accra will have to gamble on.

And the deeper implication is about volume. The root cause of Kantamanto's crisis is not a logistics problem or a sorting problem. It is the sheer quantity of clothing produced and discarded by the fast fashion system. That quantity can only be addressed by buying less, keeping things longer, and refusing to participate in the cycle that makes disposal feel consequence-free.

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*The Or Foundation's work is documented at theor.org. If you'd like to support the ongoing recovery and rebuilding of Kantamanto, donations can be made directly at kantamanto.theor.org.*

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