Kenya Remains Biggest Second-Hand Clothes Buyer

Kenya remains the world’s largest second-hand clothes importer as the east African nation imports about 100,000 tons of second-hand clothes a year.

The import not only provides the government revenues from customs duties but creating tens of thousands of jobs and also offers quality clothes to Kenyans, many of whom earn less in a month what a pair of branded clothing costs in the West.

Most of these clothes are discarded as worthless at charity shops or thrift stores in Europe or the United States and then shipped thousands of miles to another continent, occasionally in such pristine condition that an original price tag is still attached.

Many critics said this raises the perennial problem of how Africa can build its own industry when it is flooded with cheap imports. They said 85 per cent of Kenya's textile plants had closed since the early 1990s, while cotton output was a tenth of 1990s levels.

It is a common scene across Africa, with Ghana, Tanzania, Benin, Uganda and Kenya among the biggest markets. They provide clothing to many on a continent of one billion where economies may be growing but many Africans struggle to get by. However, other experts say it was not the used clothing imports that drove factories out of business, but inefficient production.

Kenya, a nation of 44 million people, is now building up a new garment-making business, but the focus this time is on exports. Kenyan factories exported garments worth $335 million in 2013 and the business employed 40,000 people.