East Africa wants to curb imports of used clothes

Not even heavy rain can keep shoppers away from Gikomba, a lively Kenyan market that stands as the largest open-air trading hub in East Africa.

Sections of the site were waterlogged on the day the BBC visited, yet shoppers, some wearing rubber boots, still inched their way through the congested pathways, hunting for Gikomba's speciality - second-hand clothing.

The trade in garments imported from the US, Europe and China poses a perennial problem for the East African Community (EAC), a regional bloc of which Kenya is a member. How can the region build a thriving fashion industry when it is saturated with cheap cast-offs?

"We're competing with second-hand clothing, but we can't compete on price," Zia Bett, founder of Kenyan womenswear brand Zia Africa, tells the BBC.

Elizabeth Paul, who owns Kuya Creations in Tanzania's main city of Dar es Salaam, agrees: "In my shop, the minimum price of a dress is 50,000 Tanzanian shillings (£14.50; $19.20). People tell me: 'For 50,000 I can get 10 second-hand dresses, so let me buy those.'"

A decade ago, the EAC decried the influx of second-hand clothing and was primed to impose a ban across its member states. After some strong-arming from the US, the proposal fell apart but now the debate has resurfaced.

Uganda, a country whose president once criticised second-hand clothing as coming from white "dead people", has introduced an additional 30% tax on imports in an effort to boost the local garment industry and protect the environment.

Days later, the treasury in neighbouring Kenya attempted to change the way it taxed used clothing, saying its proposed system would simplify things for importers. But following a backlash from Kenyans worried that this would lead to price rises, the proposal was swiftly dropped from the Finance Bill.

In a bid to support homegrown clothing manufacturers, Kenya already applies a 30% customs duty to imports of used clothing - 5% more than it costs to ship in new clothes.

According to trade data platform the Observatory of Economic Complexity (OEC), Kenya is currently Africa's leading importer of second-hand clothing or "mitumba" as they are known in Swahili.

The mitumba-loving nation received almost 180,000 tonnes of used clothing in 2022 - a 76% increase on the amount imported in 2013, UN trade data shows.

In neighbouring Uganda, second-hand clothes are the most sought-after garments, followed by imported new clothing and, lastly, locally manufactured clothing, the government-funded Economic Policy Research Centre found in 2024.

The new 30% environmental levy on used clothing comes on top of an existing 35% import duty and 18% VAT.

"The levy of 30% on worn clothing is intended to mitigate environmental degradation while promoting domestic production," the bill says, according to local news outlet the Kampala Report.

The announcement did not go down well with Ugandan mitumba traders such as Aaron Sekky.

"I don't agree with this, because this has to be a free economy," he tells the BBC.

The second-hand trade "is supporting so many people", Sekky adds - a common argument among proponents of the industry. The supply chain goes beyond retailers like Sekky and includes importers, wholesalers, tailors who mend damaged mitumba and those who sell food and drink at the markets.

There is no official data on how many people work in the industry but according to research commissioned by the Mitumba Consortium Association of Kenya (MCAK), up to 4.9 million people across East Africa rely on the used clothing trade for work.

But critics believe the employment argument is superficial.

"Retail is the most limited form of job creation you can have in an economic sector, versus production, marketing and distribution," says Dr Andrew Brooks, a King's College London academic who wrote Clothing Poverty: The Hidden World of Fast Fashion and Second-hand Clothes.

If you're just importing things and selling things, you're doing very, very little to contribute to your nation's economy.

Likewise, Lisa Kibutu, a Kenya Fashion Council board member, says many jobs involving mitumba are "hand-to-mouth" roles that do not allow for growth and social mobility.

However, she also believes used clothing provides an important service in Kenya.

"When I left Kenya in the 80s, you would see poor people without clothing. Right now even the poorest person has decent clothing," Kibutu, who previously worked in the US for designers like Giorgio Armani and Eileen Fisher, tells me.

Affordability is a huge selling point, but nowadays mitumba is no longer reserved for the poorest customers.

Najma Issa, 40, tells the BBC while shopping at Ilala market, a second-hand clothing hub in Dar es Salaam: "Most of the clothes have good quality... they last long."

Twenty-two-year-old Juma Awadh agrees: "I buy second-hand clothes because of quality and they look unique."

Even though Tanzania levies a 35% import tax on used clothes, Ilala is still overflowing with customers looking for cheap clothes. This bustling scene is one the EAC once hoped would cease to exist.

In 2015, the then-six EAC members - Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda, South Sudan, Tanzania, and Uganda - announced they would all place extremely high tariffs on - and eventually ban - the import of mitumba.

But the US, a major exporter of second-hand clothing, said such moves would violate free trade agreements and threatened to remove the EAC countries from the African Growth and Opportunity Act (Agoa).

This allows several sub-Saharan African nations to export thousands of goods duty-free to the US.

Following the US ultimatum, all EAC members except Rwanda pulled their support for the ban. Rwanda stood firm, prompting the US to place tariffs of 30% on imports Rwandan clothing, where there had previously been none.

Rwanda insists that the country has benefitted from hiking its second-hand clothing taxes from $0.20 (£0.15) to $2.50 (£1.90) per kg in 2016.

The trade ministry says that in the two years before the increase, used clothes made up 26% to 32% of garment and textile imports. In the following two years, this share dropped to between 2% and 7%, while an increase in garment exports suggests that the local industry is growing, the authorities say.

But there still appears to be a demand for mitumba smuggled in from its neighbours - the police regularly post pictures of impounded bales on social media.

Environmentalists point out that a large share of second-hand clothing sent to developing countries is of such low quality that it ends up going straight to landfill. In 2023, the non-profit Changing Markets Foundation estimated that this was true of more than one in three items of used clothing shipped to Kenya.

"There is no infrastructure to dispose of these massive amounts of textile waste, and official dump sites have been overflowing for years," environmental organisation Greenpeace says.

But Teresia Wairimu Njenga, MCAK's chairperson, argues that mitumba sellers are in fact "the champions of preservation of our environment".

Can you imagine what would happen to Kenya if we are manufacturing 198,000 tonnes [of new clothes] per year?

Yet second-hand clothing imports across the world could soon face even higher taxes. Signatories of the Basel Convention, a global waste treaty, are currently deciding whether used garments - an increasing amount of which are made from plastic fibres - should also be classified as waste.

Sceptics like Joel Okalany, a Ugandan designer whose brand Ekikumba Fusion upcycles used clothing into statement pieces, argues that East Africa is not prepared for the end of mitumba.

"The reality is, we are not yet ready for our own manufacturing to take off," he tells the BBC.

In farming, the person who uses a tractor is more efficient than the person who uses the horse. In the tailoring industry, we are still at the level where we are using the horse.

Even the Rwandan authorities appear to have come to a similar conclusion - in a report published in 2022, the country's trade ministry said it was holding off on implementing a total ban on used garments because of "current domestic gaps in the production of textiles and apparels".

Rwanda's crackdown on used clothing provides another lesson for its EAC neighbours - restricting mitumba imports will have a limited impact on the local clothing industry if the influx of cheap, new garments from countries such as China and Turkey is not controlled too.

As the supply of mitumba dwindled in Rwanda, many customers started buying imported fast fashion.

In fact across the region mitumba traders and local clothing manufacturers say cheap clothing from China is the real danger as it encroaches on both their markets.

"They'll get something that is a copy from the runway or from a designer brand and sell it at a ridiculous price," Kenyan designer Zia Bett says – though she remains optimistic.

We need to… focus on storytelling and content and quality. I think what the question should be now is: 'How do we build brands that people choose - and not just afford?'

For Njenga, both second-hand clothing and locally manufactured garments have their place.

We should allow them to coexist," the MCAK chairperson says. "Let's not kill mitumba - give the consumer power of choice.

Additional reporting by Alfred Lasteck in Dar es Salaam and Wycliffe Muia in Nairobi

Go to BBCAfrica.com for more news from the African continent.

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Source: BBC
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