Stroll through the capital today and one sees the unmistakable dominance of “bonda” – second-hand clothes stacked high, from branded jackets to jeans that once hung in European wardrobes. Affordable, durable, and ubiquitous, these garments have quietly captured more than half of Ethiopia’s apparel market. Yet their very success exposes a policy dilemma: should Ethiopia continue to absorb the world’s castoffs, or draw the line to protect its struggling textile industry?
Bonda stores, once confined to a few areas such as Chereta, are now everywhere in Addis Ababa and other major cities throughout Ethiopia. Estimates suggest that second-hand clothing worth nearly theee billion Ethiopian Birr enters Ethiopia annually, largely via smuggling routes that evade customs checks. Only a fraction is intercepted, leaving the state with billions of birr in foregone tax revenues.
Importers acquire bales cheaply—sometimes for as little as 400 Birr per jacket—before reselling them at markups of up to 1,000 Birr. This pricing structure allows used apparel to outcompete domestic producers, who must contend with higher production costs, electricity shortages, and formal tax burdens.
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The segmentation of the second-hand trade—premium pieces for boutiques, bulk sales for street vendors, and defective items for repair shops—ensures that no income group is left untouched.
The consequences for Ethiopia’s textile and garment sector are profound. Local vendors report daily sales collapsing from as consumers flock to cheaper imports. Several factories have shut down, shedding jobs and hollowing out industrial capacity. Lobby groups warnthat without decisive action, the long-term damage to domestic manufacturing will be irreversible. The government’s import-substitution strategy—so far focused on food and industrial goods—may need to extend to textiles if the sector is to survive.
This tension is not unique to Ethiopia. Across Africa, second-hand clothing has become a 37 billion US dollar industry, providing both affordable attire for millions and livelihoods for over a million informal traders, many of them women. In Kenya, now the continent’s largest importer, the trade employs entire supply chains of graders, repairers, and vendors, and has generated measurable tax revenues.
Yet in countries without restrictions, the flood of cheap imports has devastated local industries, creating dependency on foreign waste streams. Rwanda and Tanzania, by contrast, have imposed restrictions, betting on the long-term benefits of industrialisation over the short-term relief of cheap clothing.
Globally, the second-hand clothing market is projected to grow by nearly 200 percent in the next decade, threatening to deepen Africa’s role as a dumping ground unless counterbalanced by policies that nurture domestic production. For Ethiopia, the choice is stark: continue to tolerate the dominance of bonda and risk extinguishing its textile sector, or enforce controls—through tighter customs enforcement, targeted tariffs, and support for local firms—to level the playing field.
The calculus is not simple. Banning second-hand imports outright risks hurting low-income households and eliminating informal jobs in sorting and vending. But left unchecked, the sector has the potential, as one industry leader put it, “to kill domestic manufacturing.” Ethiopia’s challenge is therefore not to reject bonda altogether, but to control it—to allow the benefits of affordability and recycling while preventing it from hollowing out its own industrial ambitions.
Samson Berhane is an economics graduate with expertise in business and economic reporting and communications. He can be reached at [email protected]. The views expressed in this article are his own and do not represent the opinions of the institutions he is affiliated with nor that of the magazine.
