The Or Foundation

Our Community Business Incubator provides business development support for existing upcycling and resale business within the Kantamanto Market ecosystem as well for our internally developed product lines as we strive to implement cooperative business models. With a curriculum on financial planning, market development and durable construction, we aim to bridge Kantamanto with new markets and audiences both in Ghana and internationally. We work closely with partners in the entrepreneurship space and in retail to provide transformative tools and platforms for small businesses based on repurposing fashion's waste, and we offer seed funding to eligible program participants. Core to this is fostering viable economic pathways for participants within our Mabilgu Program to take over and run our new product development initiatives as their own businesses with community buy-in throughout the entire supply chain. In order to support this vision our Community Business Incubation team is also responsible for training Mabilgu program participants in sewing and upcycling techniques along with economic principles throughout the Mabilgu observation period, during which we work with program participants to assess the strongest apprenticeship placement opportunity for their interests and needs.

After COVID-19 lockdowns left Accra's kayayei community in a crisis without food, money for rent or healthcare, and after the December 2020 market fire destroyed over 200 market stalls before the holiday season, we began to formalize the direct relief efforts and crisis support that we had previously raised and redistributed on an as needed basis. We publicly established and resourced the Secondhand Solidarity Fund with the initial target of raising and distributing US$500,000 through the Fund annually, which we have achieved. Through our Secondhand Solidarity Fund, we distribute financial and in-kind support to over 1000 people annually, we install and maintain fire extinguishers throughout Kantamanto Market, and we offer tens of thousands of dollars in business transformation grants and low-to-no interest loans. Growing from the stability afforded through these immediate crisis relief efforts and drawing on educational programming coordinated by our Community Engagement and Business Incubation teams and on the infrastructure from our Mabilgu savings program, we have begun a community banking initiative within the Secondhand Solidarity Fund to leverage collective savings toward long-term, strategic, community-managed investments in the secondhand market.

While our previous and often-cited research, which was conducted between 2016 and 2019 and found that 40% of the average bale leaves Kantamanto as waste, revealing that there is too much clothing for any market in the world to safely handle, has been instrumental in driving attention and action on overproduction and overconsumption, we are now focused on mapping the ecological damage caused by such overflowing quantities of fashion waste. Since 2021 we have organized citizen scientists to perform weekly beach monitoring reports, tracking textile tentacles across a seven kilometer swath of Accra's beaches. Building on these findings we conduct weekly water and air sampling and analysis along with regular passive air pollution monitoring in order to track the flow of waste pollution across the coastal environment. We are now expanding this monitoring and mapping effort off of the coastline and into the Gulf of Guinea. Our team works in partnership with labs and experts both in Ghana and around the world to develop a detailed understanding of the environmental interactions between pollutants, weather systems and local ecologies. This data informs community-based remediation plans.Currently, alongside our sampling and analysis efforts, we support and operate weekly cleanups in targeted sections of Accra's beaches and monthly community cleanups along the Korle Lagoon and surrounding beaches. We work in close collaboration with the Accra Metropolitan Assembly to ensure that the tons of waste materials removed from the environment during our cleanups are transported to sanctioned dumpsites. We also are beginning to work with the community networks formed through our cleanup programs to enable the trialing of strategic bioremediation interventions focused not only on the removal of waste from the environment but the restoration of natural ecosystems. Based on the lived memory of a fishable and swimmable Korle Lagoon, we have set the goal of making Korle swimmable again by 2028.

MATERIAL RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENTWe have developed the methodology and community infrastructure to collect, sort, transport, store and process industrial scale quantities of clothing waste along a waste hierarchy informed by our local context. Following two years of product development, we are pushing toward the commercialisation of multiple material transformation pathways, including fiberboard and mops. Beyond material research and development, critical to this work is ensuring community benefit. The material systems we develop are based within the Kantamanto Market ecosystem. In addition to internally developed processes, we are working with an array of partners to pilot fiber-to-fiber recycling possibilities that we aim to operate in Ghana in collaboration with community members from across Kantamanto Market and the Ghanaian textile industry.Guiding the pace at which material innovation can create products that can safely be returned to the earth, we are working with partners and across our Material R&D, Community Engagement and Ecological Research and Remediation teams to design and build an accelerated bioreactor to decompose textile waste. Integral to these various initiatives, we regularly audit the waste stream flowing through Kantamanto and we buy material that would otherwise be regarded as waste in order to fairly compensate the retailers and upcyclers who often operate in debt trying to recirculate this unwanted clothing.RegrantingEvery year we aim to regrant between three and five percent of our annual budget directly to community and allied organizations with a primary focus on Ghana. We have so far regranted over US $250,000 to more than two dozen groups. Recipients range from Ghana's first waste picker cooperative to human rights organizations. More than two thirds of grant recipients are female-led or female-founded organizations. To support recipient identification, we have a departmental nomination process, by which our departmental teams from within The Or Foundation can put forward potential grant recipients to be considered for awards up to US 5,000. While there is often overlap in areas of focus between grant recipients and our ongoing projects and programs, we do not report the impact that grant recipients achieve as our own and our grants are largely unrestricted, with trust-based contracts and flexible reporting.The Mabilgu Program Building on our year long (2021-2022) chiropractic study with Nova Wellness Center, which revealed that women working as kayayei in Kantamanto show signs of irreversible spinal deterioration after just two months on the job, we created an apprenticeship program to foster alternative pathways outside of headcarrying. In addition to paid apprenticeship placements both internally within The Or Foundation and with trainers across Accra and Tamale, we also offer wraparound support to the women in our Mabilgu Program, which means "sisterhood" in Dagbani. We provide access to opt-in classes such as Twi, English, Sexual Reproductive Health and Financial Literacy, along with extracurricular activities, such as self-defense training and healthcare, including continued chiropractic treatment. In addition to covering costs of living and offering a fair wage payment during apprenticeship placements, we support program participants with a matched savings and grant program. For interested program participants we also offer scholarships for continued education. Our Mabilgu housing program offersself-selected participants a safe and healthy residence and a site for self-initiated urban farming. Working with allied training partners we currently have the capacity to support more than 100 women through our program annually. Our current focus is on our graduation plan, working to ensure that apprenticeships offer participants options that are economically sustainable and that will not see women return to headcarrying due to lack of opportunity.