This article is part of our ‘(Re)Made in Ghana’ series, which explores what one of the world’s largest circular fashion ecosystems – Kantamanto Market – can teach us about the future of fashion. Read our series on ‘Made in Italy’ here, ‘Made in India’ here, and ‘Made in the UK’ here.
What exactly is a just transition? In theory, it’s the idea that nobody gets left behind as major industries rush to decarbonize; that workers are upskilled or reskilled if their roles become redundant in low-carbon economies; and that environmental and social impact go hand in hand.
Tangible examples of a just transition are hard to come by in fashion. That’s why I was excited to learn about a new collaboration between Ghanaian American non-profit The Or Foundation and German non-profit The Project Justine (TPJ), which amalgamates two existing programs in their stables. TPJ’s Winneba Weavers program, named after the Ghanaian coastal town where it began, seeks to revive the local textile economy by investing in research and innovation within heritage crafts, focusing on woven textiles. Meanwhile, The Or Foundation’s Mabilgu program retrains young women who work as kayayei (headporters) in and around Kantamanto Market, and its Tarn program teaches some of them to create woven textiles from upcycled T-shirts. The collaboration hits every element of a low-carbon fashion system: job creation, upskilling, empowerment, environmental relief, localization and repurposing waste.
I first came across the collaboration in October, at the Nubuke Foundation gallery in Accra, Ghana. The exhibition was titled “From Tradition to Transformation” and charted the first six months of the project, culminating in a set of rich kente cloths woven with yarn made from damaged T-shirts (dubbed “tarn”). Here’s what I learnt.
The environmental crisis is a human behavior crisis
Accra is no stranger to oversimplified attempts at solving the waste crisis — multiple large international aid organizations have tried to clean up the local lagoon, spending millions of dollars on solutions that did not work in situ, and threatening to displace the community in the process.
The collaboration takes a more systemic approach. “The focus was on how we could solve the textile waste crisis in a way that creates dignified, respectful and liberating livelihoods,” says The Or Foundation co-founder Liz Ricketts. “We’re innovating on the product side because, at the root, we’re trying to support human beings. For me, waste is a byproduct of a deeper issue.”
Top-down, data-driven solutions — often developed outside the stakeholder groups implementing them, or the communities affected by their implementation — risk failure as soon as they’re put into practice, adds TPJ founder Rahmée Wetterich. “Solutions have to be by the community, for the community.”
The flaws in this top-down approach have been laid bare countless times, stalling progress on decarbonization: renewable energy targets forced on suppliers who don’t have access to renewable energy infrastructure, sustainable product design regulations prioritizing synthetics over natural fibers on the basis of recyclability, or brands abandoning overseas suppliers in a bid to curb airfreight emissions with no regard for the workers left behind. “Sustainability in the Global North tends to start as something transactional and it rarely leaves that space,” says Ricketts.
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Over the past few years, The Or Foundation has subsidized a number of textile-to-textile recycling pilots in partnership with European startups, hoping to turn the textile waste piling up at Kantamanto Market and clogging Accra’s waterways into valuable feedstock, which would return to Accra as yarn. But the technology that the broader industry seems to be pinning its hopes on has yet to bear fruit, Ricketts says. On the contrary, the non-profit’s explorations with tarn — including the collaboration with TPJ — has “surpassed expectations” and “shows a lot of potential” for scale. The team is now working to industrialize tarn and flex its applications as a recycled input that could help revive the local fashion industry, otherwise battered by the advent of fast fashion.
Context is key, continues Ricketts. “Circularity will never be viable within the economics of disposability. If a garment costs less than breakfast, then there isn’t enough embedded value to finance the labor, energy and other resources that are needed to keep that garment in circulation,” she explains. “Unfortunately, too many Global North recyclers have built pricing models that satisfy this broken business model of disposability, asking us to send them material for 10 cents per kilogram, which simply isn’t feasible. What we need is for the recyclers to work in solidarity with everyone else along the value chain — from cotton farmers to garment workers to Kantamanto retailers — in order to set fair prices for post-consumer feedstock, so garments have a fair shot at reuse, repair and remanufacturing.”
Empowerment and employment
Uplifting kayayei is a key driver for scaling tarn production through the collaboration with Winneba Weavers, which builds on The Or Foundation’s existing program Mabilgu (meaning “sisterhood” in the Dagbani language), a paid apprenticeship designed to rehabilitate and retrain kayayei in various skills. The hope is that this collaboration will take Mabilgu from an ad-hoc program reliant on The Or Foundation funding, to a self-funded ecosystem that can stand alone.
The current Mabilgu cohort is a remarkable group of young women, many of them climate or economic migrants from northern Ghana, grappling with the long-term impacts of carrying heavy loads in the market, as well as personal trauma. In mid-October, I spent an evening with them, listening to their stories. There were notable patterns. Many of the women came from rural villages, where traditional customs, financial strife and the loss of close family members dictated how their lives unfolded, often forcing them into work — and in some cases, marriage and motherhood — much earlier than they would have wanted. “I am the firstborn,” one woman told me. “As the firstborn, all the family’s problems rest on your head.”
Many of the apprentices came to Accra to earn money for their education, following sisters or friends that had taken the same path. One told me that she expected the streets of Accra to be paved with gold, the way it had been described to her. She found the reality to be very different. “It was not easy for me,” she said. “One day, I was roaming all day and I earned GHS 15 [around $1.30]. I spent 30 pesewas on water [there are 100 pesewas in one GHS]. Then, I wanted to eat some fufu and meat. The fufu was GHS 5 and the meat was GHS 10, but I needed GHS 5 to take a bath, and I needed money for rent. How am I supposed to pay for everything?”
There are thousands of women and girls working as kayayei in Accra s markets, some as young as six years old. It’s a precarious existence. Work can be hard to come by, and kayayei are often cheated out of agreed payments, even after the work has been done. They often live in Old Fadama, a shantytown on the banks of the Korle Lagoon, which is built on top of a dumpsite. Many share accommodation to ease the burden of rent, sometimes splitting a single room between 15 people. Their homes are surrounded by a literal mountain of waste, with discarded textiles spilling onto the pathways between homes and e-waste burners operating nearby, two challenges that pose a significant health risk: many inhabitants are at heightened risk of malaria, cholera and other diseases as a result. Others sleep outside.
Most of the women did not realize just how dangerous head-carrying is when working as kayayei. Several women came to the Mabilgu program with typhoid, having never received vaccinations or been taught how to protect themselves with good hygiene. Others had stomach ulcers, having accidentally misused painkillers sold in the market without their original instructions, to deal with the pain of head-carrying, and having gone long periods without eating. All were experiencing severe physical pain along their spines.
Mabilgu starts with a three-month “bootcamp”, which is largely focused on “neuroplasticity, the idea that your mind can change and grow”, explains the program’s assistant manager John Naporo Napari. The Or Foundation staff, trained by Kenyan mental health non-profit Shamiri Institute, administer counselling when the women arrive, complemented by lessons in English, financial literacy and numeracy, study techniques, time management, and empowerment sessions to encourage them to speak up in class.
When I met them, they were already six months in and their upskilling was well underway. The women had been assigned to local schools, depending on their chosen trade. Some are training to become photographers or leather artisans, while others are bucking gender norms by taking up welding. In total, six Mabilgu apprentices past and present have been trained to produce tarn, and two graduates have launched businesses — Dinnani and Kuoro Earth — turning tarn into everything from crochet hats and bottle bags to woven laptop cases. Their collaboration with the Winneba Weavers program is the first step toward scaling tarn and being able to create many more livelihoods for former kayayei in the process.
Reviving the local industry
Underpinning the Winneba Weavers project was a deep dive into local weaving traditions and an exploration of how colonization eroded them. “Africa lost a lot of its fabric identity through colonialism, because we didn’t continue to improve. Even the looms we use are the colonial style. We just stopped developing things locally,” says Wetterich. That’s why the project started with a research and development phase at the University of Education in Winneba. “We took the brief to the fashion and textiles department, and they went crazy. Finally, they had money to research and innovate. Now, they’re doing digital design and 3D-weaving. It’s been a process of lots of small revolutions.”
The big-picture vision is to create a textile waste solution that can scale and uplift women across Africa, continues Wetterich, taking ‘Made in Africa’ a step further by producing as much of the infrastructure domestically as possible. She points to the custom, 12-pedal looms built exclusively for the Winneba Weavers program (local looms usually have between four and six pedals). “Why do we need to use wood? Why can’t we use the fiberboard The Or Foundation makes from textile waste? Their team already made customs metal components for us out of scrap metal, which we would normally have to import,” says Wetterich. “Everything made in Africa — that’s the next step and I’m so excited about it.”
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The Or Foundation is currently studying the scalability of tarn, hoping to integrate it into existing products throughout Ghana, adds Ricketts. One example would be the woven smocks popular in northern Ghana, which often rely on imported cotton, but could be redesigned with tarn.
“We have a team in the market right now doing waste categorization, to understand how many seamless or circular T-shirts [the feedstock for tarn] there are in Kantamanto Market, and what percentage of them would likely end up as waste,” she says. “But in theory, tarn production doesn’t have to solely rely on waste from Kantamanto Market. Every household in Ghana likely has T-shirts going to waste. The next phase of business development will explore all of these avenues.”
As fashion forges ahead with decarbonization, programs like this will be vital in securing sustainable livelihoods for communities around the world, Wetterich says. “It’s not about the project, it’s about the people,” she explains. Rather than seeing sustainability in siloes and separating impact into environmental and social, carbon and water, upstream and downstream, the industry needs to start thinking in systems. “People call it a transition, but I call it transformation.”
