Can Flipping Shein’s Algorithm Fix Fashion’s Problems?
And How Ghana Has the Potential to Birth a New Chapter
Let’s Start With the Truth: Ghana is absorbing the cost of other people’s fashion fantasies.
Every week, hundreds of tons of used clothes arrive at the Port of Tema. They come sorted, bundled, and branded as "donations," but 40% of the clothing is unsellable waste. This is not just a textile problem. It’s a supply chain of externalised costs, dumping environmental, economic, and psychological burdens onto countries like Ghana. As Tara Zhang writes in her Human Rights Research (2024) article: “We’re not just a case study in waste colonialism. We’re the cautionary tale of what happens when style is built on speed, and speed is built on someone else’s land, labour, and landfill”.
I don’t intend this piece as an exposé. It’s a blueprint. A third lane. One that isn’t a finger-wag at fast fashion or a nostalgia trip about pre-colonial textiles, but a strategic, clear-headed call to action for anyone serious about redesigning fashion’s future.
Here’s what to stop. Here’s what to build. Here’s who should pay. And here’s how Ghana—and the Global South—can help set the rules of the game.
DESIGN: IF IT’S BROKEN FROM THE BEGINNING, REPAIR WON’T SAVE IT
Fashion has a design problem. Not the aesthetic kind, the system kind. Garments today are built to fail: polyester-cotton blends that can’t be recycled, embellishments that make disassembly impossible, and collections made faster than logistics can catch up. It’s industrialised inefficiency—or what we now call efficient pollution.
This is where we begin: upstream. If we want to fix fashion, we have to fix what gets produced, how it gets made, and why it was made in the first place.
Take Shein. Underneath the drama, the ultra-fashion brand’s data-driven, SKU-level production engine is one of the most efficient tools for avoiding overproduction we’ve seen. That system—predictive, real-time, agile—could be powerful if decoupled from volume-based growth and repurposed inside a low-velocity design system.
Imagine this—predictive demand used to create modular garments. A shirt with updatable sleeves, buttons, or silhouette, which wouldn’t require disposing of the whole thing. Seasonal trends will be managed by versioning rather than introducing a high volume of new products.
This is the heart of Design Sovereignty — Fashion designed for context and place. Here, there’s no need for Ghanaian designers to mimic Scandinavian minimalism to be sustainable. They need the tools, autonomy, and capital to build for their climate, their culture, and their customers. That means rethinking “innovation” beyond digital tools—to include tailoring, modularity, and climate-aware fabrics.
And when Global North producers get serious about designing for disassembly, investing in African pattern libraries, and supporting R&D in adaptable fabrics, then Kantamanto can do what it already does even better: upcycle, rework, and respond.
Overproduction drops. Design meets reality. Circularity becomes real infrastructure.
TRENDS & BEHAVIOR: TASTE IS POLICY
Let’s get honest. People don’t change their behaviour because they were told to. They change because something cooler, smarter, or more rewarding comes along. Worry not, activists. It is not a moral failure, just a matter of sociology.
Blumer (1969) said it best: “Fashion is a creator of social order. Not a mirror of individual taste, but a collective script.”
In Ghana, the rise of designers like Ajabeng, Oldie but Goodie, Chiip O’ Neal or Re’House by goTo prove that when sustainability feels stylish, people don’t need to be persuaded. They demand to see it, touch it, and wear it. It’s why thrift culture thrives in Accra. Not because of eco-consciousness, but rather because it feels fresh and cool.
What does this mean? Building fashion sustainability and local appetite for circular designs is a marketing problem as much as a manufacturing one. TikTok challenges, Sunday best, and streetwear drops—they can all serve as taste-shifting levers. If we reposition reuse as the default, repair as a flex, and rework as art, we don’t need guilt trips. We need good stylists and business folk ready to get to work.
MARKET MODELS: BUILDING INDUSTRY FROM THE WASTE STREAM UP
Ghana doesn’t yet have a fashion industry in the textbook sense. What it has is a fashion system. Messy, informal, undercapitalised, and externally dependent. Kantamanto is the engine where traders, tailors, and reworkers create entire wardrobes from the world’s fashion leftovers. It’s not polished, but it’s powerful. And if we’re serious about building something scalable and sovereign, this is exactly where we start: with what already works.
Let’s build fibre labs right on the edge of the market. Small-scale, community-run spaces where unsellable imports are shredded and blended with local agricultural waste like cotton, banana, or pineapple fibre. These labs could become the foundation of Ghana’s circular textile material. Imagine what comes in broken exits as something new.
To power the ecosystem, we need transparency for both compliance and value creation. A simple tagging system—QR codes or barcodes—can tell us where a garment came from, what it’s made of, and what’s been done to it. That information helps vendors price more accurately, tailors earn royalties on remade items, and buyers know they’re supporting real reuse.
Access is also key. Most Ghanaians can’t afford a GHS 600 upcycled outfit. Essentially, circularity has to meet people where they are. That could mean tiered pricing models for repairs and rework, co-ops backed by microfinance, or rental services for office wear and occasions. Upcycling should feel aspirational, yes—but never out of reach.
If we do this right—fibre labs running, traceability flowing, co-ops thriving—Kantamanto doesn’t just survive; it evolves. From informal hustle to circular engine. From waste management to wealth creation. That’s how Ghana builds a real fashion industry: from the bottom up, using what we already have.
POLICY & LEVERAGE: FROM RECIPIENT TO RULE-MAKER
Protectionism won’t save us. But power might.
Ghana is not a large consumer market. But it is a high-impact recipient market. What happens here can change how the fashion industry views its end-of-life responsibilities.
So let’s talk levers:
- Enhance EPR: Any brand whose clothes are found in Ghana’s waste stream pays into a cleanup and recycling fund.
- Textile Waste Index: Ghana launches a dashboard that names the worst dumping brands based on volume, recyclability, and resale rates. The OR Foundation currently publishes the names of brands that send the most second-hand clothes to Accra, most of which end up as waste on beaches and in landfills. This dashboard would build on that foundation, adding the above-mentioned metrics.
- West Africa Waste Alliance: Ghana, Nigeria, and Kenya negotiate as a bloc to control waste imports, demand infrastructure investments, and set recycling standards.
- Tiered Import Licenses: Green light for traceable, recyclable goods. Red light for toxic blends and mystery bales.
Drawing on Bjørn Lomborg’s cost-benefit approach—selecting the highest-value outcomes for each dollar spent—we should prioritise fabric recycling, repair apprenticeships, and local dye supply chains. While Lomborg has been criticised for underplaying environmental urgency, his core insight on maximising impact per dollar aligns perfectly with Ghana’s need to get outsized social and economic returns on limited resources.
Don’t ban second-hand clothing. Banning second-hand clothing won’t fix the problem. It’ll just bury the evidence, cut livelihoods, and leave the Global North’s overproduction crisis conveniently invisible. Make it accountable. Don’t shut Kantamanto. Fund it.
WHAT NEXT-GEN FASHION LOOKS LIKE
This has nothing to do with charity. Guilt isn't the focus. It has to do with strategy.
If you’re a policymaker in Brussels or a sustainability exec in New York, the question is no longer, "How do we help Ghana?"
The question is, "Why aren’t we building with Ghana?"
Here is a country where reuse is culture, where circularity is a tactic of survival. The people are ready. The systems exist. They’re just waiting for capital, infrastructure, and policy to catch up.
And if you’re in Ghana? Know this: you are not downstream. You are not a passive recipient of fast fashion’s sins. You are a co-author of fashion’s next chapter.
Let’s write it like we mean it.
OVER TO YOU -
OVER TO YOU -
Support brands and initiatives like Ajabeng, Oldie but Goodie, Chiip O’ Neal or Re’House by GoTo as they exemplify the type of fashion future we want to see.
Learn more about and support Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) by demanding visible fees on clothing items, transparency, modest cost to support textile recycling and reuse, and advocate for brands.
Support the OR Foundation, GoTo, The Revival - all local Ghanaian initiatives tackling waste colonialism and encouraging climate action locally.
Take the opportunity to rethink your relationship with the brands you wear. You have the power to hold them accountable and demand change at every interaction.
