The bedbugs Europe sent: How imported used clothes are infesting Zimbabwe's poorest communities

For Gogo Emma Siwela, 70, a grandmother in Matapi Flats — one of Mbare's most notorious neighbourhoods — the bedbug infestation caused by imported garments poses daily danger for the young grandchildren in her care. When the insects overwhelm her, she boils water in a desperate attempt to flush them out. 'That makes our blankets wet at night and poses burning risks to my grandkids,' she told FairPlanet in a face to face interview, gesturing at damp blankets from her latest attempts to scald the bugs away. 'These bedbugs are terror.'

Would you like us to summarize articles for you?

In Mbare, the largest shanty town of Zimbabwe’s capital city of Harare - home to about 500,000 to 800, 000 residents - the choice of what to wear is stark: either go without decent clothes because new garments are unaffordable, or spend scarce money on a bagful of previously worn shirts, underwear, shoes, trousers shipped for resale from Europe. 

‘We have extremely limited choices between decent clothes, or saving money for food and medicine,’ Madeline Gomo, 34, a stay-at-home mother in Mbare, told FairPlanet in an interview,  rifling through old school blazers- originally shipped from France - retailing for $1 at an open-air market in Matapi Flats. 

But the convenience of cheap imported clothing comes with a hidden cost: a growing infestation of bedbugs that is making rest elusive for Mbare’s residents, most of whom live in dilapidated colonial-era hostels. 

Outbreak of bedbugs

‘Non-hygienic, cheap used imported clothes are fuelling this wave of bedbugs. It is a crisis brought from Europe,’ Jacob Mafume, the mayor of Harare, told FairPlanet, placing blame squarely on mabhero, Shona slang for bales of second-hand clothes, which are distributed by street resellers across almost every market in the capital.

The Nyerere, Matapis, and Shawasha neighbourhoods – among the densest in Mbare - are the most heavily affected, Mafume said. In 2025, the Zimbabwe High Court ordered the  city  to urgently carry out a refurbishment programme restoring  clean water, sewer management, reliable electricity and recreational facilities to Mbare.  Progress has been slow. The mayor acknowledges the city is caught in a 'budget crisis' — yet as residents' anger over bedbugs intensified, Harare cobbled together a public programme to mass-spray the worst-affected areas. Faced with an embarrassing crisis, the government of Zimbabwe responded with a blunt instrument – a ban on the importation of used clothes, introduced in April. Informal trader Joe Sibanda calls the measure ‘completely irrational’ since it threatens the livelihood of thousands of people dependent on the trade. ‘No one on the street obeys that ban. We have had these bans on and off for 20 years,’ he said. 

A Tortuous Trade 

As poverty deepened sharply  in Zimbabwe over the past 15 years, used clothes – mostly imported from Europe - have become a critical lifeline for millions of families. Though the government does not keep central data on quantities imported, the UN Comtrade data shows $31m worth of used apparel entered the country in 2024, dwarfing the $1.37 million in new clothing, mostly from China.

‘Technically, used clothes imports are banned and traders should be arrested – but in reality they slip in easily, in tonnes, daily via the country’s borders and hundreds of unmanned frontier posts,’ Siphiwe Panganayi, an informal trader, told FairPlanet in an interview in Harare. ‘Police look the other way for bribes and let lorries carrying the clothes cross the border – in some cases the police officers are themselves traders in these clothes. It’s a big business putting food on thousands of families’ tables.’ 

Panganayi sits in the middle of this chain, linking used-clothing buyers with haulage truck operators and smugglers across the border in Mozambique, where the Indian Ocean port city of Beira serves as the primary landing point for European used clothes.

Dennis Juru, president of the South Africa International Cross Borders Traders Association, told FairPlanet that second-hand clothing plays a critical economic role for both buyers and sellers in Zimbabwe, a country with chronically high unemployment. 

The clothes travel from Europe primarily through the Port of Beira in Mozambique. Once they arrive, convoys of lorries are loaded directly at the port and begin the clandestine journey westward into Zimbabwe. Along the route, money changes hands — corrupt police and immigration officers accept cash payments to wave the bales through without scrutiny. 'It is basically a trade that begins legitimately in Europe and ends under clandestine networks in Zimbabwe,' Juru said.

'It’s a no-brainer,' said Shabiso Pondo, a student who bought a 2kg bag of used bras, made in Spain, for just $3 at a Mbare market. When the used clothes are distributed to street traders, business moves fast: students, pensioners, and adults crowd open-air markets weighing up old imported hats, skirts, leggings, and ties made in Poland, England, or Denmark. 

But Pondo has second thoughts. Three of her neighbours have abandoned their bedrooms, she says, as ferocious bedbug attacks made sleep impossible and left babies with wounds and skin infections from scratching. 

'Bedbugs carried in imported clothes from Europe are not only a public health and dignity crisis in Zimbabwe’s poorest communities – they are a mirror of three forces pressing hard against one another,’ said Precious Shumba, director of the Harare Residents Association, the capital’s most vocal pressure group.

There are the exporters in Europe making profit from shipping these unwanted goods; a Zimbabwean government whose policies have left the economy crippled and its citizens wearing undignified clothing; and the residents of  townships like Mbare who hunger for cheap clothes but pay the price of bedbugs, Shumba added. 

Eradication efforts have also run into trouble, says Mayor Mafume. When fumigation teams arrived in some neighbourhoods, scores of residents barred their doors after false claims spread that the chemicals being used were dangerous heavy pesticides — a category of chemicals that carries deep social fear in Zimbabwe.

'It was misinformation spreading fast. For bedbugs we use very safe fumigation chemicals approved by the Ministry of Health and meeting strict WHO standards,' Mafume told FairPlanet

A 'double-edged' sword

The export of used clothing from wealthy countries to Africa is widely described as 'dumping', a practice that floods markets with low-cost goods, making it very difficult for a sustainable domestic textile industry to emerge, says Emil Wolff, a professor at the Institute of Public Administration at Leiden University in the Netherlands, who specialises in the used-clothing trade and the textile industry in East Africa.

Professor Wolff told FairPlanet that used clothes in Africa represent a ‘double-edged sword’. It is probably hard for African governments to resist pressure from the countries in the global north to keep accepting these imports - because there are powerful tools built into the global trade system that make it very difficult to push back. She references her research on how the Office of the United States Trade Representative pressured East African nations—threatening to revoke preferential market access under the African Growth and Opportunity Act—forcing Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania to abandon their initial bans on used clothing imports in 2016. At the same time, building a new, domestic, sustainable textile industry involves significant economic costs that most countries in the region simply cannot absorb overnight.

Community-led Solutions

To prevent used clothes from triggering a public health crisis, community ownership of anti-bedbug measures is essential, says environmental governance expert Tapuwa Nhachi.

'Give incentives for people in Mbare to cooperate on anti-bedbug fumigation. Give them a motivation to design their own regular, affordable home cleansing and spraying routines. Public health success is 50 per cent community buy-in, 50 per cent medicine,' Nhachi told FairPlanet.  

The city of Harare needs to rely less on top-down enforcement campaigns, Nhachi argues, and work instead with traders' leaders, religious leaders, headteachers, and parents in Mbare to engage community health workers and address the root questions: what drives health crises like bedbugs into poor neighbourhoods; what sanitation measures can residents take to reduce habitats for the insects; and what fumigation approaches are safe and effective in densely packed urban settings like these.