When Waste Becomes Community: How Kantamanto Market is Redefining Customer Experience in Global Fashion Supply Chains
In the congested alleyways of Accra’s Kantamanto Market, something remarkable happens every single day. Fifteen million pieces of discarded clothing arrive weekly, most dumped from the closets of Global North consumers who will never see them again. These garments, stained and worn, represent a customer experience crisis that extends far beyond shopping malls in London, New York, or Toronto.
The real customers here are the 30,000 traders, tailors, and upcyclers who’ve inherited the world’s fashion addiction problem. Their experience isn’t one of choice. It’s survival. Yet within this crisis lies an extraordinary lesson about how authentic customer experience transforms when communities take control of broken systems.
The Silent Customer Journey Nobody Talks About
When you buy fast fashion—that discounted H&M dress, those Zara pants, the Shein haul stacked in your cart—your customer experience ends at checkout. You wear it once, twice, maybe three times. Then it sits in your closet, collects dust, and eventually gets donated.
What happens next? That’s where the real customer experience begins.
Those donations reach Kantamanto, where traders purchase unsorted bales without knowing contents. A bale costs money. Opening it is a gamble. Sometimes 90% of items sell. Sometimes only 30% do. When quality plummets and supply overwhelms demand, unsold clothing doesn’t vanish. It ends up on beaches, in lagoons, clogging waterways where children drink, fish swim, and sea turtles nest.
Solomon Noi, Accra’s waste management chief, articulates the stark reality: an estimated 70 tons of clothing per day escape from Kantamanto as waste. That volume suffocates ecosystems. Native sea turtles cannot access nesting grounds. Local fishermen lose access to productive waters just three nautical miles offshore. The waste isn’t invisible—it’s tangible, catastrophic, and entirely human-created.
Environmental Destruction as a Customer Experience Outcome
Greenpeace’s 2025 report, “Fast Fashion, Slow Poison,” exposed that nearly 90% of discarded clothing contains synthetic fibers like polyester. These materials fragment into microplastics, infiltrating marine environments and eventually seafood consumed by Southern communities. Meanwhile, air sampling from public washhouses in Accra’s Old Fadama settlement detected dangerously high levels of carcinogens like benzene and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs).
The customer journey here looks horrifyingly different. For Accra residents, the experience involves contaminated drinking water, mosquito-borne disease outbreaks, and compromised food sources. For kayayei—the female migrant head porters who balance 50-70kg clothing bales on their heads for less than $2 daily—the experience includes neck pain, skin rashes, malaria, and psychological distress.
Research from the University of Ghana and other institutions shows that 86.6% of kayayei suffer from depression, while 94.4% experience anxiety. Women carrying loads earn wages that prevent them from accessing formal healthcare. Catastrophic medical expenses drive further migration, creating cycles of poverty and ill-health that perpetuate.
The customer experience here is not about convenience or price. It’s about whether you have clean water, whether your body survives your labor, whether dignity remains intact.
The Moment When Customers Became Innovators
In 2018, Yayra Agbofah walked through Kantamanto with a simple observation. Unsellable garments created waste. Why not transform waste into solutions?
He began repairing damaged clothing and returning items to traders. “This was about to be thrown away. Now you can sell it,” he’d explain. The practice grew organically. From this kernel of action emerged The Revival, an organization that fundamentally reframed how customer experience works in fashion’s waste ecosystem.
The Revival now operates six upcycling studios within Kantamanto. The organization has transformed more than 12 million garments from landfill-bound waste into valuable products. Former kayayei—women who once carried 70kg loads—now work as skilled upcyclers, earning sustainable income while reclaiming physical and mental health.
David Donko represents this transformation. After losing his stall in a market fire, he received training from The Revival. Today he operates Lifestyle Denim, creating bespoke upcycled clothing for Ghanaian celebrities. His customer experience shifted from subsistence to entrepreneurship. His labor became recognized. And is creativity became valued.
Tiny strips of denim get woven into hard-wearing rugs. Bed sheets transform into skirts and blouses. A woman formerly carrying loads now cuts and designs. The Revival’s model demonstrates that when communities own the solution, customer experience shifts from extraction to creation, from disposal to dignity.
The Or Foundation’s Research-Driven Approach
The Or Foundation operates with a different logic. Rather than assuming Global North solutions work everywhere, they embedded themselves in Kantamanto for a decade. Research became action. Advocacy became community-driven.
Since 2022, The Or Foundation has conducted air and water sampling throughout Accra. Their investigations traced brand tags from Nike, Marks & Spencer, and H&M directly to beaches where textile waste accumulates. The research didn’t stay academic—it moved into policy, proving that firsthand textile waste demonstrates these brands’ direct responsibility.
The Or Foundation has distributed $3 million in recovery support since the January 2025 fire that devastated Kantamanto. This wasn’t charity positioned from distance. It was investment in local capacity, in market infrastructure, in the actual people whose customer experience matters most.
Their approach included training local women in mop-making from 100% cotton t-shirts. The process remains intentionally simple, enabling others to replicate and establish their own enterprises. When organizations genuinely understand their customers’ constraints—time, capital, competing priorities—design becomes accessible.
Water Systems, Waste, and What Actually Matters
Here’s where customer experience thinking meets environmental justice. Kantamanto’s waste literally contaminates water supplies. The lagoon receives constant flow of synthetic fibers, broken zippers, and polyester fragments. Water testing reveals impacts downstream.
Traditional water and sanitation approaches treat the symptom—providing filters or boiling instructions—without addressing the root. The Revival and Or Foundation work differently. They address the waste source. They empower the communities managing disposal. Above all, they build systems where water protection and livelihood creation happen simultaneously.
When a woman trained in upcycling earns enough to rent safer housing with improved sanitation, her family’s water access improves. When textile waste stops flowing into lagoons, fishing becomes viable again. These aren’t separate problems. They’re interconnected aspects of the same customer experience crisis.
Lessons for Global Customer Experience Strategy
Most organizations define customer experience within narrow parameters: pricing, convenience, digital ease. Kantamanto teaches a more comprehensive truth. Customer experience extends through entire systems, across borders, into communities who never chose to participate.
For CX professionals, this means:
Recognize that consumption creates downstream customers. Every purchase decision shapes experiences for people never in your marketing funnel. The trader in Accra represents an actual customer of your brand’s overconsumption.
Understand that fixing problems at source matters more than managing waste downstream. The best customer experience happens when unsustainable production decreases rather than when disposal becomes slightly better.
Invest in customer agency. Provide tools for communities to solve their own challenges. The Revival’s simplified mop-making process and The Or Foundation’s training programs recognize that communities understand their needs better than distant organizations.
Center marginalized voices. Kayayei, traders, and upcyclers weren’t historically asked how to improve their experience. When they gain control, solutions emerge that respect dignity and build resilience simultaneously.
Build accountability into global systems. When brands remained silent after Kantamanto’s devastating fire despite profiting from the market’s waste processing, they revealed that customer experience stops at transaction. Real accountability extends backward through entire supply chains and forward into communities absorbing consequences.
The Fire as Catalyst
On January 1, 2025, a fire claimed two lives and destroyed over 60% of Kantamanto. Eight thousand stalls disappeared in hours. The community’s response reveals the customer experience they’ve built. Rather than collapse, traders, tailors, and upcyclers worked collectively.
By August 2025, Kantamanto reopened with a newly formed association—KOBA—representing all market sections for the first time. Unified security, fire safety measures, and rebuilding plans emerged from community consensus, not top-down mandates.
Yet the fashion industry’s silence remained deafening. New bales continued arriving weekly. Brands whose clothing fed the waste crisis made no meaningful commitments to change. The customer experience for 30,000 people hanging in limbo received no corporate acknowledgment.
This contrast matters. It reveals where real accountability lives—not in corporate statements but in communities rebuilding their own systems.
Actionable Pathways Forward
For CX professionals engaging with fashion, sustainability, or global supply chains:
Map your actual customer ecosystem. Who participates in your product’s complete lifecycle? What’s their experience? What do you not see because distance obscures it?
Establish feedback loops with downstream communities. Kantamanto traders never had direct communication channels with brands whose waste they managed. Building genuine feedback creates mutual understanding.
Measure customer experience beyond consumption metrics. Include environmental metrics, community health outcomes, and livelihood stability. A garment creating hazardous working conditions for upcyclers represents a failed customer experience regardless of purchase satisfaction.
Support grassroots innovation. The Revival and Or Foundation emerged from communities, not consultants. Allocate resources to local organizations already solving these problems rather than designing parallel initiatives.
Demand policy change from governments and brands. Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) programs for textiles, as advocated in the Stop Waste Colonialism campaign, distribute accountability fairly. This isn’t optional sustainability—it’s fundamental to responsible customer experience design.
The Experience that Matters
Kantamanto Market represents a customer experience transformation hidden from Global North consciousness. Traders navigate uncertainty with ingenuity. Upcyclers create beauty from waste. Water systems stabilize when waste decreases. Kayayei transition from subsistence to skilled work. Communities rebuild after devastation with resilience that outsiders rarely witness.
This is the real customer experience—one where actual humans determine their own futures rather than inheriting the consequences of distant consumption choices. It’s an experience built not through corporate marketing but through genuine community innovation, mutual aid, and dignified work.
The fashion industry can recognize this customer experience and support it, or it can continue pretending that consumption ends at checkout. Kantamanto has already made its choice. The question remains what Global North organizations will do.
