The Women Who Bear the Burden of Fashion's Overproduction Problem - Textile Exchange All Insights 2025, News The Women Who Bear the Burden of Fashion’s Overproduction Problem 8 mins read Words by Nana Akua A Mensah, with photography by Faiz
8 mins read
Words by Nana Akua A Mensah, with photography by Faiza Salman and Tonia-Marie Parker
.
Kantamanto is more than a market. It is its own ecosystem, sustained by tens of thousands of people who sort, mend, and reimagine excess clothing discarded by the original consumers. But today, even this most innovative of systems is being pushed to its breaking point.
Watch the short film
Director:
Tonia-Marie Parker
Co-Director:
Faiza Salman
Director of Photography:
Julius Tornyi
Production:
The Or Foundation
Editor and Sound Designer:
Nunana Linda Amemordzi
Production Coordinator:
Henry Wright Annan
Voice Over:
Nana Adoma Asare Adei, Stella Oppong Agyare, Fideis Issah
Rows of single-use t-shirts from marathons, conferences, and family reunions hang displayed on the stalls of secondhand clothing vendors that line one of the entrances to the world’s largest secondhand market, Kantamanto.
The image of these often context-specific objects, striking not only for their abundance but also for their absurdity in a new place where the messages they carry are unfamiliar, offers a prescient preview of the market.
Located in the heart of the business district of Accra, Ghana, Kantamanto is spilling over with fabric and materials, color, and activity. The Accra Metropolitan Assembly estimates that about
30,000 people earn their livelihoods in the market
, working as traders, menders, upcyclers, leatherworkers, food vendors, and porters. Each person contributes to a remarkable infrastructure that has been organically built, adapted, and refined since the 1950s, when the secondhand clothing trade first took hold in Ghana. Together, they have created an ecosystem of care and ingenuity; they sort, repair, and bring new life to the excess clothing that is cast off from the Global North.
And yet, even with all this labor, the system is overwhelmed.
Everywhere you look, there is fabric: towering piles on the side of the street, draped over the arms of traders on the move looking for customers, and bursting from bags in vendors’ stalls. The sheer volume of clothing arrives faster than Kantamanto’s workers can absorb it. What emerges is an integral community, led largely by women, who have innovated one of the most authentic circular economies in the world, persisting in the face of the unyielding excess of fashion’s waste.
An estimated
15 million garments
passed through the Kantamanto market every week before the tragic fire that destroyed 60% of the market in January 2025, slowing down business. With the meteoric rise of fast fashion, the global fashion and apparel industry produces an ever-increasing number of new garments each year. The approach to fashion consumption has shifted dramatically over the last two decades: where clothing was once intended to be re-worn, cared for, and mended, it
