East African governments are intensifying efforts to restrict the import of used clothing, a trade that has sustained millions of livelihoods across the region while simultaneously undermining efforts to build domestic textile industries. Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda have each pursued variations of import restriction policies over the past decade, with mixed results, and the current phase of tightening represents a convergence of economic nationalism, industrial policy ambition, and political calculation that is reshaping one of Africa’s largest informal trade sectors.
The used clothing trade — known colloquially as “mitumba,” the Swahili word for bales — is a multi-billion dollar business that supplies the wardrobes of tens of millions of East Africans who cannot afford new garments. In Kenya alone, the Mitumba Business Association estimates that the sector employs directly and indirectly more than two million people, from the workers who sort and bale clothing in markets in Nairobi and Mombasa to the roadside vendors who sell individual items in towns across the country. The economics are straightforward: a bale of sorted second-hand clothing purchased in a European or American market for between five and fifteen dollars can be broken down into individual items that retail for between fifty cents and five dollars each, generating margins that sustain entire economic ecosystems.
The Domestic Textile Industry Argument
The case against used clothing imports is made primarily on industrial policy grounds. East Africa’s textile and apparel sector has significant potential — cotton grows well in several regions, labor costs are competitive, and the African Continental Free Trade Agreement has opened new possibilities for regional market integration. But the sector has never developed at scale because it cannot compete with the price point of used clothing, which arrives at virtually no manufacturing cost. If used clothing imports were phased out, the argument goes, demand would shift to domestically produced garments, creating jobs in manufacturing, supporting the cotton sector, and building industrial capacity that could eventually serve export markets.
The Kenyan government has made this argument explicitly in its consultations with the African Growth and Opportunity Act bilateral working group, noting that the used clothing imports are among the factors that have prevented Kenya’s apparel export sector from scaling. Kenya signed a framework agreement with the United States in 2023 that included a commitment to develop a roadmap for phasing out used clothing imports in exchange for continued AGOA eligibility, but the roadmap has stalled amid resistance from the informal sector and uncertainty about whether domestic production capacity could absorb the demand shock that a phased ban would create.
The Consumer Reality
The industrial policy argument has merit in theory, but critics — including some within the Kenyan government — note that it underestimates the economic function that used clothing currently serves for households that have no realistic alternative. A farmer in western Kenya earning the equivalent of three dollars a day cannot afford a new t-shirt priced at eight dollars. The mitumba bale makes a two-dollar shirt available. Phasing out used clothing without simultaneously expanding the supply of affordable new clothing would simply price those households out of the clothing market entirely, a consequence that the proponents of restriction have not adequately addressed in their public communications.
The political economy of the mitumba trade is also more complex than it appears. The sector’s workforce is disproportionately female, concentrated in informal urban markets, and politically organized through trade associations that have demonstrated the capacity to mobilize protests that have in the past forced the government to retreat from proposed restrictions. In 2016, when the Kenyan government attempted to implement a ban on used underwear imports — citing public health concerns — the mitumba traders mounted a legal challenge and a public campaign that resulted in the government reversing its position within weeks. That episode remains a reference point for both sides in the current debate.
What is clear is that the status quo is becoming increasingly untenable for all parties. The global second-hand clothing market is evolving, with some European countries imposing stricter quality standards on exports that will over time reduce the volume and quality of what reaches East African markets. East African governments are under pressure from their own industrial policy ambitions to demonstrate progress on diversification. And the workers in the mitumba sector are not a static constituency — they are moving into other informal economic activities as the returns from sorting and selling used clothing decline. The question is not whether the used clothing trade will eventually be restricted, but whether the transition will be managed in a way that does not leave millions of East Africans without an affordable clothing option while domestic production capacity is still being built.
