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.
Each week, up to 15 million used garments pass through Kantamanto Market in Ghana, most of them imported from the Global North and many ending up as waste — clogging the lagoon, washing up on the beach, or spontaneously combusting underfoot in the local dumpsite. In this context, repurposing, upcycling and recycling are more than just buzzwords, they are critical lifelines to deal with a crisis that the local population did nothing to create. These are the innovators pushing circular fashion forward.
Gloria Asiamah
Founding member of the Kantamanto Women’s Association (KWA), executive of Kantamanto Obroniwawu Businesses Association (KOBA), and supervisor of Kanta Keepers market cooperative
Gloria Asiamah — known affectionately as Aunty Gloria — has worked at Kantamanto Market for 33 years. She started as a retailer, but seven years in, shifted her focus to upcycling, after the quality of used clothing bales imported to Ghana began to decline, and the economics of simply reselling imported clothes no longer made sense. “I have two children. If I just bought bales, I would have lost all my money. How would I take care of them?” she says. “I thought, OK, I’ll change these blouses into tops and bottoms. At first, there were plenty of customers. People came from Côte d’Ivoire and Burkina Faso to buy these things. I couldn’t do all the orders myself, so I started to pay my friend to help me.”
Asiamah’s upcycling operation continued to grow. Now, she heads up a whole section of the market dedicated to upcycling, helping other market traders turn damaged adult jeans into children’s jeans, adhere graphic prints to secondhand T-shirts to cover stains, and all manner of other creative upcycling projects designed make the most of whatever retailers cannot sell. As the only female market leader, she is also a founding member of the Kantamanto Obroniwawu Businesses Association (KOBA), which was created off the back of January’s disastrous fire.
When the fire struck, Asiamah’s entire section burnt to the ground. Like many market traders, she slept at the market throughout the rebuild, refusing to leave, even when it wasn’t safe to be there. After the rebuild, Asiamah says she is more determined than ever to get justice for Kantamanto Market. “The sorters need to do better and give us good clothes, and the brands need to pay us for what we are doing.”
Ruth Odoom, Samuel Gyasi, Frances Fafa Mensah and Fred Nabi Yankey
Next-generation upcyclers and upcycling educators
Aunty Gloria helped to pave the way for upcycling at Kantamanto Market, but now a new generation of upcyclers are hoping to go one step further, refining and elevating upcycling so their goods can compete on the global stage. Shepherding this next generation is The Or Foundation’s OWO School program, an accelerator that has helped over 40 upcyclers since its founding in 2023. The four-month program, led by a group of experts including remanufacturing lead Fred Nabi Yankey and head of peer education Frances Fafa Mensah, teaches participants how to turn upcycling into a viable business and teases out the complexities of upcycling in a flawed system: should you work with synthetic fibers, which are abundant but not as breathable? How do you design for end-of-life? What should the customer relationship look like to promote aftercare? At the OWO Festival — a huge celebration of upcycling hosted by The Or Foundation in mid-October — this year’s cohort presented its group projects, head-to-toe “showstoppers” flexing their creativity to the max.
Among this year’s cohort are Ruth Odoom and Samuel Gyasi. Odoom started working in the market at 17, and spent the last 13 years upcycling men’s shirts into boxer shorts, a common upcycle at Kantamanto. Through OWO School, she has learnt pattern-making (she used to cut freehand, leading to more waste) and has improved the finishing on her products, adding a matching bralette for women. Previously, she charged just GHS 6 per pair of boxer shorts (around 50 cents in USD). Now, she can charge up to GHS 250 ($22) for a matching set.
Gyasi was introduced to Kantamanto by a friend, about a year before he started the OWO School program. He started working with denim, but has since shifted to leather, making patchwork bags and jackets from damaged goods sold in the market. Alongside OWO School, he is studying fashion design at a local college, and runs the brand Gabusu. “I want my brand to be global, with lots of hands working together,” he says. “I want to show people that the materials in Kantamanto Market are still worth working with. It’s not waste to us.”
Najiha Yahaya and Latifa Forkwie
Tarn Program participants
Throughout Kantmanto Market are thousands of women and girls working as kayayei (headporters), some as young as six years old (exact numbers vary seasonally). In Kantamanto, kayayei carry bowls of goods (such as food), bags of waste, and whole bales of textiles that need to be transported between importers’ containers, storage and market stalls. According to The Or Foundation, the kayayei who carry 55 kilogram bales are primarily between 14 to 35 years old. They must weave through narrow, crowded market aisles, and are often paid less than 30 cents for trips over one kilometer long. These young women — many of whom are climate or economic migrants from northern Ghana — live and work in exploitative conditions, and many have died or been seriously injured in the process. One of The Or Foundation’s flagship programs is Mabilgu (meaning “sisterhood” in the Dagbani language). Here, kayayei are rehabilitated, many given access to safe housing, healthcare, therapy and English lessons for the first time. During their paid apprenticeship, they are retrained or upskilled, offering them a route out of head-carrying.
The Tarn Program is one of Mabilgu’s most successful off-shoots to date, teaching young women how to turn damaged T-shirts that cannot be sold in Kantamanto Market into yarn (this is called “tarn”), and weave it into products spanning from laptop cases and water bottle bags to hats and clothes. Kuoro Earth (run by Latifa, Rahama, Zuwera and Fatima) and Dinnani (founded by Najiha) are two brands hoping to take tarn global, cleaning up Accra’s textile waste crisis in the process. “I just wanted to do something I had a passion for. We are pushing it forward to see how we can make the sales better,” says Latifa. “With Dinnani, my vision is to help other girls who are head-carrying because they have no other choice,” adds Najiha. “I want to create jobs for them, if they want to learn and save the environment, because the waste is too much.”
Mary Dorkurugu
Material operations supervisor at The Or Foundation
The materials that cannot be sold in the market or upcycled into other products are dubbed asaɛ (waste), gathered by the Kanta Keepers market collective and brought to The Or Foundation’s Material Technology and Transformation Lab (MTTL) for sorting. Here, the garments with high cotton content (60% or more) are put through a second sorting machine to confirm their composition, before being shredded and granulated into pulp. This is mixed with cassava starch, which acts as a glue, and pressed into two-by-four-foot fiberboards, which can be turned into everything from shelves and furniture to loud speakers.
Material operations supervisor Mary Dorkurugu was instrumental in building out this process. Using the small shredder MTTL prototyped the fiberboards on as her starting point, Dorkurugu constructed scaled-up shredder, granulator and “shredulator” machines from scratch, with scrap metal sourced from around Kantamanto Market. “It took a few months to build each machine, but we were able to use 100% scrap metal,” she explains, pointing to the abundance of scrap yards in the local area, whose work mirrors the textile traders in many ways, but with imported cars and used electrical goods. “This work makes me a pillar of my family, and the impact makes me feel like I can transfer knowledge to others while caring for my environment as well. I am very proud.”
David Akpablie
Environmental field operations supervisor at The Or Foundation
It’s a Tuesday afternoon in mid-October, and I’m on Jamestown Beach in Accra with almost 100 other volunteers and more than 60 members of beach clean-up cooperative Tide Turners. Together, we are fishing textile waste out of the sea, sorting through to find and document recognizable brand labels, and slowly filling a 30-ton truck with textile waste. It’s hot and taxing work, digging through sodden and insect-infested waste on your hands and knees, in the blazing sun. Every week, the cooperative members and volunteers give up two hours of their time to do this, and every week their work is quickly undone by the seemingly unstoppable influx of overproduced and unwanted textiles. “You can’t fix these problems in a day,” says David Akpablie, who leads the clean-up operation. “You have to be consistent and have faith that it will be well.”
The Tide Turners are a prime example of citizen science in action. Primarily made up of artisans and performers who live near the beach, the cooperative is now an essential cog in Accra’s fight against textile waste. Alongside the regular beach clean-ups, which focus on surface waste, the Tide Turners use pickaxes to unearth the deep-rooted “tentacles” of waste, matted together by waves and lodged as deep as six feet beneath the sand. Complementing their work is a team of 11 beach monitors stationed along the coast, keeping tabs on new waste streams, and The Or Foundation’s water sampling team, which tracks microplastic pollution. Earlier this month, the combined teams reported a major milestone: between June 2023 and May 2025, they removed two million kilograms of waste from Accra’s beaches, identifying 3,800 fashion brand tags in the process. Among the most common tags were Adidas, Nike, Marks Spencer, Next and PVH (conglomerates are reported collectively).
For the most part, textile waste washes up on the beach after being dumped at Korle Lagoon when retailers cannot sell, upcycle or properly dispose of the waste that has become a permanent fixture in imported bales. Educating these retailers about where their waste ends up and advocating for better waste management infrastructure is a growing part of Akpablie’s job, but he knows it’s not enough. “I want brands to realize that whatever they are producing over there is causing harm to someone here. There are more than enough clothes already in the system. That’s why we’re calling on brands to Speak Volumes [a campaign by The Or Foundation encouraging brands to disclose and reduce their production volumes by unit].”
Freeheart Noel Kordah
Documentary photographer
Photographer Freeheart Noel Kordah grew up playing soccer on the shores of Accra, but the mounting textile waste crisis soon made this impossible. Kordah took up photography, capturing the changing landscapes around his hometown, inextricable from the textile waste washing up on its beaches. When he started supporting The Or Foundation’s beach monitoring team, his purpose came into focus. “I believe there are a lot of stories that are not told properly, and that people are not aware of,” he says. “So I use photography as a way of communicating with people, adding emotion and keeping an archive of key issues over time.”
Exactly how much of the used clothing imported to Ghana is rendered waste upon arrival has been hotly debated, with sorting and importing associations suggesting that The Or Foundation’s analysis (that just under 6% arrives as the lowest quality or fourth selection, and 40% leaves the market as waste) is inflated. Watching retailers at Kantamanto Market open fresh bales to find high counts of stained, torn or otherwise unsellable garments, and standing on literal mountains of textile waste at Jamestown Beach, it’s hard to give that debate much merit. This is the reality Kordah wants to capture. “I like to keep my work real and tell the story exactly how it is,” he says, pointing to an ongoing series that captures the before and after of The Or Foundation’s weekly beach clean-ups. Documenting the reality can be quite harrowing, but Kordah is careful not to play into harmful narratives about Ghana, and to couple photography with captions that encourage people to take action, rather than consuming storytelling purely as entertainment. “It’s nice to show the change as well as how bad things can be. I like to give people hope, because we can’t do this alone.”
Katia Osei
Head of environmental justice at The Or Foundation
When I visit in October, I see two pigs bathing in the shallow canal tucked behind Kantamanto Market. I’m told that this time last year, the water was so clogged with textile waste — and so contaminated with toxic chemicals and heavy metals — that it was inhospitable to wildlife. Alongside the June Fourth Taskforce (a community cooperative initiated and trained by The Or Foundation to clear the waste site next to the canal), the shift can be credited to Katia Osei, The Or Foundation’s head of environmental justice, who designed the filtration system slowly restoring the water to healthier chemical levels. Three large metal crates are filled with a combination of large rocks, biochar (a carbon-rich, charcoal-like material created by heating organic matter) and the coconut fiber so abundant in Accra — a perfect example of Osei’s guiding philosophy, that the most impactful science is accessible and applicable.
“In the Global North, you’re using the most complicated methods to make a small impact. Here, it’s the opposite,” says Osei, nodding to her time in the US, studying bioengineering at Harvard. Much of her work is about solving “chemistry puzzles”, adapting existing protocols and methods to get the best possible results with the limitations of a small, community-run lab. From restoring the canal and researching microfiber fragmentation to the much bigger challenge of clearing the Korle Lagoon downstream and tempering the effects of PFAS and heavy metals in textile waste, Osei and her team are doing a lot with a little, always with impact as the end goal.
“For me, the solution isn’t a specific thing we do, but a change in the way we see the world,” she explains. “A lot of the community members we support are living in survival mode and don’t have the privilege of caring about the environment. We get to help them reorient themselves to see the bigger picture: what if it didn’t have to be like this? What if people gave you money to just clean your neighbourhood? What if we planted trees here just because it’s nice? It’s the little things that allow you to question everything else — that’s the real solution.”
