Isaac Eshun watches closely as reams of newly printed fabrics flow down from the giant rollers overhead, vast sheets of cloth with intricate orange and blue designs tumbling from the factory’s whirring machines. The 53-year-old technician has spent almost half his life working at this textile company in Tema, a coastal town around 10 miles from the capital of Accra, yet such a career is increasingly rare in Ghana’s once thriving textile industry, reports the Media. Counterfeit goods, border inefficiencies and rising costs have hit the industry hard, and last month it emerged the government had replaced a local company as the provider of school uniforms for public schools with a Chinese fabric producer. “I have worked here for 25 years and our product is very fine and people can see the difference when they buy it, but the counterfeiting is a problem,” Mr Eshun says. “It is killing us and it is killing the industry.” Ghana’s markets have flooded with cheap imports, arriving mainly from China in the last decade and under 3,000 jobs now remain in an industry which employed more than ten times that in the 1980s. “The productivity of local companies is fast declining because of pirated textiles that come into the country,” says Charles Asante-Bempong, a director at the Ghana Employers’ Association (GEA). “They are cheaper… [but] their designs are stolen and replicated with a lower quality and it is killing their businesses.” Another issue is that while locally produced cotton is used by firms, many of the dyes, chemicals and machines are imported from abroad at significant prices. Located in Tema, GTP is one of only four factories still operating. Renowned for its traditional designs and wax printed fabrics, the company has seen production levels drop 30 per cent and its production unit half since 2005. Mr Eshun is among 650 factory staff remaining.
