A quiet crisis is unfolding across East Africa. Bales of discarded western clothing, shipped by the tonne from charity shops and recycling centres in Europe and North America, continue to choke the region’s nascent textile industry. Despite rising political will to curb these imports, the economic and environmental calculus remains starkly unfavourable for local manufacturers.
The numbers are brutal. The East African Community (EAC), a bloc of six nations including Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania, imports roughly 150,000 tonnes of used clothing each year. That figure represents a flow of garments that undercuts locally produced fabric by a factor of four. A new shirt stitched in a Nairobi factory costs the equivalent of 8 US dollars to produce. A second-hand shirt from a Mitumba market bale costs the consumer 1.50 dollars. The arithmetic is merciless.
Kenya leads the region’s fightback. In 2016, the country announced a phased ban on used clothing imports, hoping to revive a textile sector that employed over 500,000 people in the 1980s. That ban never fully materialised. US pressure, channelled through the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), forced a retreat. The US Trade Representative argued that Kenya could not restrict imports while enjoying preferential access to American markets. The ultimatum was simple: open your borders to our used clothes or lose your duty-free access for new garments.
The environmental argument for stopping the flow is equally compelling. The second-hand clothing trade is a veneer of recycling. In reality, up to 40 per cent of what arrives in East Africa is unsaleable: torn, stained or simply out of fashion. That waste ends up in open dumps or is burned, releasing microplastics and carbon dioxide. The Great Rift Valley now hosts mountains of textile waste that leach dyes and synthetic fibres into the water table.
Rwanda has been the exception. In 2018, President Kagame hiked tariffs on used clothing to 60 per cent of the value of the goods. The result was a measurable rebound in local production. The country’s flagship garment manufacturer, C&H Garments, now produces 1.5 million shirts annually for export to Europe. But Rwanda is small. Its internal market cannot absorb the volume that Kenya or Ethiopia requires.
The real driver of the import surge is the sheer cheapness of the waste. In the UK, a bin bag of used clothing costs a charity 5 pence per kilo. Shipping it to Mombasa adds another 10 pence. The final price to the wholesaler is still lower than the raw cotton cost for a local weaver. This is a structural subsidy from the global north to its consumers, externalised onto the labourers and ecosystems of the global south.
Technology offers a partial exit. Several Kenyan startups are experimenting with textile recycling: shredding unsaleable cloth into fibre for insulation or upholstery padding. The economics remain marginal. A tonne of recycled fibre sells for 120 dollars, compared with 300 dollars for raw cotton. The energy cost of collection, sorting and processing wipes out any margin.
East Africa faces a choice that is both moral and economic. It can continue to serve as the world’s wardrobe disposal unit, accepting the environmental degradation and the suppression of its own industrial base. Or it can choose to protect its nascent factories and accept the likely loss of AGOA benefits. The former path is the one of least resistance. The latter is the only one that offers any hope of a balanced, local textile economy.
For now, the second-hand bales keep arriving. The Mitumba traders, a powerful political constituency, resist any restriction. The local factories run at 30 per cent capacity. The arithmetic remains unchanged. The planet keeps warming, and a shirt that once hung in a London wardrobe ends its life as a sandbag in a Kampala drainage ditch. That is the physical reality of this trade. And the data will not soften its blow.
