The Ghana Technical and Vocational Education and Training Service (TVET Service) has established a partnership with The Or Foundation to provide young people with skills training in circular design and sustainable fashion, aiming to turn the country's growing textile waste burden into entrepreneurship and employment opportunities.

Key Points

  • The partners are Ghana's TVET Service and The Or Foundation, and the content is skills training in circular design and sustainable fashion.
  • The training targets young people in Ghana, with the official positioning of preparing them as a talent pool for entrepreneurship and employment.
  • The backdrop to this move is that Ghana's increasingly severe textile waste problem is seen by officials as a potential industrial opportunity.

Ghana's textile waste problem has long been tied to its capacity to absorb imported second-hand clothing. After large volumes of used clothes enter the local market, the portion that cannot be resold ultimately becomes a burden on landfills and beaches, with disposal costs continuing to rise. This partnership between Ghana's TVET Service and The Or Foundation seeks to intervene at the skills level: no longer treating textile waste merely as a burden to be cleaned up, but as a source of raw material that can be processed, transformed, redesigned and re-entered into the market.

According to the positioning disclosed in the report, the training centers on "circular design" and "sustainable fashion." This means participants are not learning traditional tailoring-style processing, but rather designing products and processes around reuse pathways for discarded textiles, creating a new loop between the urban waste system and fashion consumption.

The collaboration is an institution-to-institution arrangement: one party is the TVET Service, responsible for Ghana's national technical and vocational education policy and implementation, and the other is The Or Foundation, which has long worked on second-hand clothing issues in and around Accra. The training is open to young people, and the officially stated goal is to enhance their entrepreneurial and employability skills—in other words, the course is designed as an entry point to livelihoods, not merely environmental education.

Industry Significance
Placed back in the second-hand clothing trade chain, this partnership points to an emerging industry direction: countries receiving used clothing imports are no longer confined to the sorting and resale end of the trade, but are also beginning to cultivate local design, transformation and recycling capabilities. For West African markets that have long depended on "mitumba" supply (a term broadly referring to second-hand clothing in Kenya and East Africa, used here to point to the overall shape of Africa's imported used-clothing market), vocational skills programs of this kind may gradually change the local role—from a destination for consuming second-hand clothing to a processing location that creates value from discarded textiles. Whether this shift can reach scale still depends on the connection between training outcomes and follow-on financing and product sales channels.

Source: TVET Service, The Or Foundation promote sustainable fashion through skills training · Originally published 2026-10-13