Uganda Circular Textiles

Last updated on 17 July 2025

Background Information

Uganda imports 80,000 tonnes of used clothing each year to meet the demands for affordable clothing in the country. These goods are imported as bales from the US, China, or Europe and can vary in quality. The epicentre of secondhand clothes in Kampala, Uganda, is Owino Market, the largest market in the country and home to over 2,000 market traders, many active in selling secondhand clothes. Most traders do what they can to repair and alter garments for sale; despite this, discarded used clothing ends up in local landfills. The long-term vision is that Uganda will develop its own textile manufacturing base, which will negate the need to import high volumes of clothes from the global north. However, until the textile manufacturing base develops, secondhand clothes will remain in high demand.

The Uganda Circular Textile project, led by consortium partners Uganda Tailors Association, Kampala Women Entrepreneurs’ League (KaWEL) and Management Training and Advisory Centre (MTAC), is designed to support a transition to a local Ugandan textile manufacturing base by incorporating clothes that would have otherwise ended up in landfill into new products and design. The project will assess the existing secondhand textile value chains in Kampala to establish the types of materials that are currently discarded and will explore commercially viable alternative uses for these materials. The project will pilot collection systems to divert unwanted items from Owino Market to a new Textile Reuse Hub situated at MTAC, and train tailors and designers to repurpose these goods for sale. The project will build separation and sorting systems for the discarded garments, which will be repurposed into new items, including new designs, accessories, reusable nappies and sanitary pads, cleaning items and soft furnishings. This intervention will demonstrate how applying WasteAid’s innovative whole-system approaches to the circular economy can create jobs and establish commercially viable secondary textile value chains.

It is anticipated that the pilot will have the following impacts:

Upskilling tailors and product designers to reuse secondary textiles – the project offers tailors (90% women) access to training and skills, business mentorship, and youth-expanded technical and enterprise training.
Test and develop various business models to establish and scale commercially viable value chains in the secondary textile sector.
Aim to repurpose 270 tons of post-consumer textile waste during the project period. Textile recycling helps avoid methane emissions from landfill decomposition and reduces open burning, contributing significantly to greenhouse gas emissions reduction.
Opportunities for inclusion – stakeholder engagement is inclusive, targeting the informal sector and marginalised workers, e.g. KaWEL and women trader sub-groups and waste collectors. The co-design of the collection network and Textile Reuse Hubs includes such groups.

Updates

Having completed the market assessment of waste flows in Owino Market as a key milestone deliverable, the project team and SMEP PMA have since been considering the implications of the key findings of the study for the broader industry.

The study highlighted the importance of the secondhand clothing value chain to numerous livelihoods in Kampala and how valuable this commodity is as an affordable source of clothing. It furthermore revealed that a much smaller percentage of imported secondhand clothing ends up as discarded waste from this market (less than 1%) than previously estimated. The type of textile waste generated from this market is notable, as it consists predominantly of fabric offcuts from tailors who provide mending and alteration services, with very few whole garments being discarded.

Although significant in volume, the nature of the textile waste from the market posed a challenge to the planned project deliverables – being mostly offcuts, the material limits the range of commercially viable upcycled products that can be produced.

As a result, the project team undertook a rescoping phase during which they proposed a downcycling option for the offcuts—shredding the collected textile waste for potential use as stuffing material by furniture manufacturers. However, their preliminary findings indicate that this approach is still premature in the Ugandan context, with further research and development required to compete with the furniture sector’s reliance on inexpensive, commercially available imported stuffing. What the team did discover was that some spinning mills in Uganda are stockpiling post-industrial textile waste, which sparked a discussion on the need for local recycling and processing facilities that could potentially recover and repurpose this uncontaminated textile waste.

Although the project has now concluded, the research generated and the connections established across regions have created valuable momentum. The SMEP PMA, UNCTAD and others hope to build on this by contributing to the ongoing dialogue around the secondhand clothing industry in the context of the Global South.

Knowledge outputs

A full copy of the Owino market assessment can be downloaded here .

A complementary UNCTAD study analyses shipment and market data to understand the dynamics of the secondhand clothing markets in Uganda and Tanzania. By examining trade data (including cost, insurance, and freight) and conducting large-scale field surveys with nearly 2,000 traders, the research highlights how factors like country of origin, pricing, and garment quality shape the profitability and preferences in secondhand clothing markets. The aim is to inform locally relevant, evidence-based policy that also aligns with broader global sustainability objectives.

Banner Photo: Secondhand clothing in Owino market, Kampala. Credit: Faith Gara
Photo Gallery: See individual photo captions. Credit: Elzette Henshilwood, Faith Gara and Henrique Pacini