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Second-hand clothing driving sustainable economic growth and job creation in Africa’s green economy, new Oxford Economics research shows

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LONDON, Oct. 8, 2024 /PRNewswire/ — Second-hand clothing (SHC) is stimulating billions of dollars in GDP contributions and supporting hundreds of thousands of green jobs across Europe and Africa, a new report from Oxford Economics reveals today.

The report The Socio-Economic Impact of Second-Hand Clothes in Africa and the EU27+ reveals that the sector – a vital part of a future circular textile economy – contributed over $100 million to the GDP of Ghana, Kenya and Mozambique in 2023.

In Ghana, second-hand clothing from the EU27+ contributed an estimated $76 million to the country’s GDP (of which $35 million was direct), supporting at least 65,000 formal and informal jobs in 2023. That same year, $17 million was contributed to Kenya’s GDP ($9.2 million directly) and $10.7 million to Mozambique’s ($2.7 million directly). There were 6,300 people in Kenya’s formal workforce and at least 68,000 informally. In Mozambique, a total of at least 20,700 formal and informal roles were supported.

In these three countries, it is estimated that more than 100,000 jobs are sustained through the SHC trade with the EU27+. Jobs range from wholesale importing to transporting, retailing, and tailoring. Employment generated helps alleviate poverty by offering income-generating opportunities to those who might otherwise be unemployed or underemployed, enabling people to support dependents. The informal SHC industry supports several opportunities for women and youth; 77% of the interviewed informal retailers in Ghana, Kenya, and Mozambique were women, and approximately 70% younger than 45 years old.

As the report only quantifies the socio-economic impact of the direct trade between Ghana, Kenya and Mozambique and the EU27+, the impact would be even greater factoring in clothing that arrives via intermediary clothing sorting centres in the Middle East and Asia.

It is the first comprehensive analysis of the sector’s entire value chain and an attempt to quantify the sector’s socio-economic impacts across two continents. The sector bridges global supply and demand by efficiently channelling surplus clothing from the Global North to the Global South, where demand for affordable, quality garments continues to grow, ensuring that clothing stays in circulation, helping to meet climate targets and protect the environment.

The report highlights how SHC enables sustainable development while providing an important source of quality, affordable clothing for millions across Africa. This affordability plays a crucial role in improving living standards and enabling consumers to allocate more of their limited income to other essential needs such as food, healthcare, and education. The sector also contributes to poverty alleviation by creating employment and entrepreneurship opportunities.

While the sector is an important source of affordable clothing as well as jobs in many African countries, many importers and traders suffer the impact of high import tariffs on second-hand clothing, which impacts their competitiveness. Rather than boost local manufacturing, this further supports the import of cheaper new and lower quality fast-fashion from China, at a huge environmental cost.

If steps are not taken to strengthen the sector, its success in supporting national climate targets and the Sustainable Development Goals, particularly around poverty, women’s inclusion and responsible consumption, could be undermined.

The report was commissioned by Humana People to People and Sympany+.

Muimui Karoline Akatama, Circular Textiles Spokesperson, Global South at Humana People to People, said “Governments and policymakers have a unique opportunity to support a sector that not only creates green jobs and contributes to poverty alleviation, but also holds vast untapped potential for sustainable growth across Africa.”

Johanna Neuhoff of Oxford Economics added, “With the right legislative backing and investment in sorting infrastructure, waste management, and partnerships with local manufacturers, the second-hand clothing sector can catalyse economic transformation while promoting a circular textile economy that benefits both people and the environment.”

Recommendations include supportive legislation and greater investment from governments and policymakers to support the growth of the second-hand clothing sector. This includes lower import tariffs, investment in infrastructure and technology to manage waste, policies to support the informal workforce, and cooperation with businesses.

The assessment of the socioeconomic impact of SHC in the EU27+ and the three selected African countries used a standard analytical framework, known as an economic impact assessment. This involved quantifying the three economic impact channels, namely the direct, indirect (supply chain), and induced (wage-financed consumption expenditure) channels:

The direct impact relates to the operations of all organisations and businesses in the SHC industry, namely the collection, sorting, and retail of SHC in the EU27+, as well as the wholesale, formal retail, and informal retail of SHC in Ghana, Kenya, and Mozambique connected to the direct imports of SHC from the EU27+.The indirect impact is the economic activity and employment sustained in the industry’s supply chain via the spending of SHC organisations and companies on goods and services in the EU27+, Ghana, Kenya, and Mozambique.The induced impact comprises the wider economic benefits that arise from the payment of wages by the industry and the businesses in its supply chain. Employees who receive wages spend their earnings as consumers in the economy of their country, stimulating further economic activity and jobs.The three channels of impact combined make up the second-hand industry’s total core economic impact.

ABOUT OXFORD ECONOMICS
Oxford Economics was founded in 1981 as a commercial venture with Oxford University’s business college to provide economic forecasting and modelling to UK companies and financial institutions expanding abroad. Since then, we have become one of the world’s foremost independent global advisory firms, providing reports, forecasts, and analytical tools on more than 200 countries, 100 industries, and 8,000 cities and regions. Our best-in-class global economic and industry models and analytical tools give us an unparalleled ability to forecast external market trends and assess their economic, social, and business impact.

Headquartered in Oxford, England, with regional centres in New York, London, Frankfurt, and Singapore, Oxford Economics has offices across the globe in Belfast, Berlin, Boston, Cape Town, Chicago, Dubai, Dublin, Hong Kong, Los Angeles, Mexico City, Milan, Paris, Philadelphia, Stockholm, Sydney, Tokyo, and Toronto. We employ 450 staff, including more than 300 professional economists, industry experts, and business editors—one of the largest teams of macroeconomists and thought leadership specialists. Our global team is highly skilled in a full range of research techniques and thought leadership capabilities from econometric modelling, scenario framing, and economic impact analysis to market surveys, case studies, expert panels, and web analytics.

Oxford Economics is a key adviser to corporate, financial and government decision-makers and thought leaders. Our worldwide client base now comprises over 2,000 international organisations, including leading multinational companies and financial institutions; key government bodies and trade associations; and top universities, consultancies, and think tanks.

https://www.oxfordeconomics.com/

ABOUT HUMANA PEOPLE TO PEOPLE
Humana People to People is a Federation of 29 independent associations involved in humanitarian and sustainable development activities. Members of the Federation Humana People to People are active in 46 countries in Africa, Asia and Central and South America.

https://www.humana.org/

In Angola, Guinea-Bissau, Malawi, Mozambique and Zambia, members of the Federation Humana People to People operate a combination of second-hand clothing sorting centres, wholesale outlets and retail shops that are run as social enterprises. The proceeds from the sale of clothes and shoes are invested in social development projects in each country. In 2023, Humana People to People’s global second-hand clothing operations secured over $31.6 million in development funding.

ABOUT SYMPANY
Sympany+ is a Dutch non-governmental organization (NGO) dedicated to sustainable textile circularity. The organization focuses on creating a closed-loop system for post-consumer textiles through various projects and research initiatives. Additionally, Sympany+ ensures that all working conditions within their projects adhere to OECD guidelines.

https://www.sympany.nl/

Photo – https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/2525607/Africa.jpg

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Aolani and Rafay Collaborate on One of the Industry’s First NVIDIA DSX OS Deployments on NVIDIA GB200 NVL72 Infrastructure

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The collaboration demonstrates how next-generation AI infrastructure can be transformed into production-ready AI platforms for enterprise and cloud providers.

SUNNYVALE, Calif. and SINGAPORE, July 26, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Rafay Systems, a leading platform provider for modern infrastructure and AI workloads and a member of NVIDIA Inception, today announced a strategic collaboration with Aolani to deliver one of the industry’s first deployments of NVIDIA DSX OS running on NVIDIA GB200 NVL72 infrastructure, helping demonstrate how next-generation AI infrastructure can move from installation to production-ready AI services.

As organizations continue investing in accelerated computing, the competitive advantage is shifting beyond acquiring GPUs. Success increasingly depends on how quickly providers can operationalize infrastructure, onboard customers, govern multi-tenant environments, and deliver AI services that developers and enterprises can consume immediately.

The collaboration between Aolani and Rafay addresses that challenge by combining Aolani’s next-generation AI infrastructure with Rafay Platform’s orchestration, automation, multi-tenancy, and lifecycle management capabilities to create a production-ready AI platform built on NVIDIA AI infrastructure.

Rather than delivering raw GPU infrastructure alone, the solution enables organizations to provision Kubernetes clusters, virtual machines, AI workspaces, and inference environments through a secure self-service experience while maintaining centralized governance, policy enforcement, and operational visibility.

“Aolani has always been committed to delivering faster time-to-value for our customers,” said Nicholas Chia, CEO of Aolani. “Our customers are at the bleeding edge of AI development, and they need to provision, govern, and scale from day one in an industry that moves at lightning speed. Building the next generation of AI cloud means solving for more than just compute capacity, but also production-grade platforms that enable operational readiness from the get go. That’s why we are so excited about this partnership with Rafay.”

The announcement reflects a broader transition taking place across the AI infrastructure industry. As cloud providers, enterprises, and sovereign AI operators deploy increasingly powerful GPU infrastructure, attention is moving toward the software layer that enables those investments to become secure, scalable, and commercially viable AI platforms.

“AI infrastructure has entered a new phase,” said Haseeb Budhani, CEO and co-founder of Rafay Systems. “The question is no longer how quickly organizations can deploy GPUs. It’s how quickly they can transform that infrastructure into a governed, self-service platform that developers can use and operators can manage at scale. We’re excited to collaborate with Aolani to help demonstrate what’s possible with NVIDIA AI infrastructure and accelerate the path from hardware deployment to production AI services.”

The deployment combines Aolani’s AI cloud infrastructure with the Rafay Platform to simplify infrastructure bring-up, automate lifecycle management, enforce enterprise governance, and provide developers with immediate access to production-ready AI environments. The result is a platform designed to support model development, training, inference, and future AI service delivery without requiring organizations to assemble the operational software stack themselves.

As next-generation AI infrastructure continues to scale globally, Aolani and Rafay are demonstrating how infrastructure providers can move beyond deploying GPU capacity to operating modern AI platforms that accelerate customer adoption, improve infrastructure utilization, and shorten time to value.

About Aolani

Where AI gets built in Asia. Founded in 2023, Aolani’s AI factories enable enterprises, AI natives, and sovereigns to build with confidence, scale ambitiously, and move at hyper-speed in the world’s fastest-growing AI market. Founded in Singapore and backed by compliant and purpose-built neocloud infrastructure, Aolani delivers the performance capabilities for next-generation AI. For more information, visit www.aolanicloud.com and follow @AolaniCloud on LinkedIn.

About Rafay Systems

Rafay Systems is a leading software provider powering the operators building the AI cloud, including neoclouds, telecommunications providers, enterprises, and sovereign AI operators. The Rafay Platform lets these organizations operationalize GPU and compute infrastructure with self-service automation, governance, and multi-tenancy, spanning bare metal provisioning, infrastructure lifecycle management, virtual machines, Kubernetes, GPU PaaS, AI development environments, and Token Factory  for publishing AI models as token-metered inference services. By simplifying orchestration and operations across this stack, Rafay helps operators increase GPU utilization and turn raw infrastructure into monetizable, production-ready AI services, all while maintaining security, consistency, and control. For more information, visit rafay.co.

Media Contact
H/Advisors on behalf of Aolani Cloud
klareco-aolani@h-advisors.global

Angela Shugarts
Rafay Systems
angela@rafay.co 

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Lianlian DigiTech and UnionPay International Partner to Deploy AI-Agent Payments for Global Procurement

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HANGZHOU, China, July 27, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Lianlian DigiTech and UnionPay International signed a strategic cooperation agreement on July 18 to develop AI-agent payment applications for cross-border commerce. Sun Dali, Co-President of Lianlian DigiTech, attended and signed on behalf of the company.

The partnership combines Lianlian DigiTech’s AI-agent platform with UnionPay International’s global payment network. Initial focus areas include global procurement and AI Token replenishment, with AI-assisted procurement workflows connecting directly to cross-border payment infrastructure. The broader collaboration will also encompass overseas merchant acceptance expansion and joint AI technology R&D.

Launching Deployment Global Procurement

Building on the existing B2B payment business cooperation between Lianlian DigiTech and Union Pay International, the partnership will be further extended into AI-Agent payment Scenarios. The inaugural application introduces a Human-in-the-Loop AI-agent payment solution for global procurement, which will effectively address enterprises’ pain points in cross-border B2B payments.

Cross-border purchasing has long suffered from structural inefficiencies—protracted settlement cycles, exchange-rate volatility, layered compliance demands, and manual reconciliation.

The partners will integrate AI-agent capabilities throughout the procurement workflow—from supplier matching and product selection to payment execution. Under the Human-in-the-Loop model, the AI agent executes procurement tasks autonomously while users retain final approval authority, marrying AI-driven efficiency with human judgment.

The partners will use global procurement as the initial deployment, refining the experience and architecture based on real-world feedback, with a longer-term ambition to drive industry-wide standardization and broader adoption of AI-agent payment solutions across additional business verticals.

Long-Term Technology Collaboration

Beyond expanding AI-agent payment applications internationally, the two companies will collaborate on AI technologies for financial services through ongoing technical exchanges and joint development, advancing innovation and broader industry adoption.

Lianlian DigiTech said the partnership reflects its long-term commitment to integrating AI with cross-border payments. As an AI-native company building global financial infrastructure, it views this collaboration as an important step in bringing AI-agent payment technologies into commercial use, and will continue working with industry partners to provide businesses with more intelligent global payment services.

UnionPay International noted that as AI reshapes financial services, intelligent and digital transformation have become essential to sustainable industry growth. Drawing on its global payment network and seamless B2B digital payment solutions, including Virtual Commercial Card Program, it will work with Lianlian DigiTech to promote standardization and scaled adoption of AI-agent payments, ensuring AI-driven financial innovation supports the real economy.

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Siemens advances self-verifying agentic AI workflows for semiconductor and PCB design

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Combines Siemens’ EDA expertise and software with NVIDIA AI infrastructure and software to improve result quality, time-to-results, tool-calling reliability and token efficiency for long-running engineering workloadsEnables agentic AI workflows that help engineers improve productivity and design quality across the electronic design automation (EDA) lifecycleDelivers more predictable, trusted outcomes through physics-based EDA software validationIntegrates with Siemens’ Intelligence Center X, supporting agent creation and orchestration, and intelligence into broader enterprise reasoning across design, manufacturing and supply chain operations

PLANO, Texas, July 26, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Siemens today announced an expansion of its strategic partnership with NVIDIA to deliver self-verifying agentic AI workflows to EDA, helping semiconductor and printed circuit board (PCB) engineering teams move from autonomous task orchestration toward more trusted, continuously validated engineering outcomes. The new capabilities build on Siemens’ recently introduced Fuse™ EDA AI Agent system and add new NVIDIA AI technology to help long-running, domain scoped, AI agents reason, act and continuously validate decisions against deterministic, physics-based EDA engines.

The updates to Siemens’ Fuse EDA AI Agent are designed to help the semiconductor and PCB industry move beyond simple automation and deliver trusted and verifiable outcomes that improve result quality, time-to-results, tool-calling reliability and token efficiency across long-running engineering workloads. The Fuse EDA AI Agent system is now integrated into Siemens’ recently launched Intelligence Center X, supporting agent creation and orchestration in Siemens’ enterprise industrial AI environment. Intelligence Center X delivers AI-driven, coordinated processes across design, manufacturing and supply chain – enhancing the comprehensive Digital Twin to support smarter execution and more trusted outcomes.

“Our expanded collaboration with NVIDIA enhances our domain-specific industrial AI, physics-based EDA engines and accelerated computing to create trusted, self-verifying AI workflows,” said Amit Gupta, senior vice president and chief AI strategy officer, Siemens EDA, Siemens Digital Industries Software. “By enabling autonomous and long-running EDA AI agents to continuously validate their decisions against proven engineering tools accurately and efficiently, we help customers accelerate development, improve design quality and increase confidence in trusted engineering outcomes.”

“Semiconductor and PCB design are among the most complex engineering challenges in the world, and AI agents need trusted tools to reason, act and verify their work,” said Timothy Costa, vice president and general manager of computational engineering at NVIDIA. “Siemens is combining its EDA software with NVIDIA accelerated computing, AI software and Nemotron open models to create self-verifying agentic workflows that improve design quality, speed up results and give engineering teams greater confidence in every step of the process.”

Enabling trusted self-verifying AI agents for semiconductor and PCB design

The Fuse EDA AI Agent solution now combines Siemens engineering intelligence and trusted verification capabilities with NVIDIA AI infrastructure technologies to execute complex semiconductor design tasks with enhanced speed and precision:

Optimized EDA agents built with NVIDIA NeMo Gym open library for agentic environments improve result quality, speed and token efficiency for semiconductor and PCB design. This empowers customers with EDA design flows that get smarter over time with self-verifying agents which learn from every project to automatically improve execution strategies, optimize workflows and make better use of accumulated context.The NVIDIA OpenShell secure runtime enables enterprise scale design teams to run autonomous agents across their entire EDA environment with enterprise-grade security, access controls and audit trails within governed runtime environments.Advanced reasoning with the latest NVIDIA Nemotron models and Switchyard accelerates design with AI agents that understand complex engineering trade-offs at the speed of AI reasoning and supports complex engineering workflows with improved performance and token efficiency.NVIDIA accelerated computing and CUDA-X libraries helps design teams achieve signoff-quality results in hours instead of days, powering both AI reasoning and EDA engines for dramatic speedups without sacrificing accuracy.

Together, these capabilities enable secure and token-efficient multi-agent coordination, real-time feedback and improved convergence across semiconductor and PCB design and verification flows, helping customers achieve trusted engineering outcomes.

Comprehensive end-to-end design automation

Building on these capabilities, Siemens’ Fuse EDA AI Agent orchestrates workflows across the semiconductor and PCB lifecycle. Domain-specific agents collaborate across synthesis, verification, implementation and validation processes to optimize outcomes holistically.

The new offering spans Siemens’ EDA technologies across the full semiconductor and electronics lifecycles, from high-level synthesis with Catapult, verification with Questa One and Veloce, and custom IC design and verification with Solido, through to physical implementation with Aprisa, signoff verification with Calibre and design-for-test with Tessent. It also supports advanced 3D IC integration using Innovator3D IC and PCB design with Xpedition.

Accelerating custom integrated circuit (IC) design with agentic AI

The expanded collaboration enhances Siemens’ Solido Characterization Suite with agentic AI capabilities. These agentic workflows automate library characterization by automatically generating and verifying Liberty files by running Solido Characterizer with Solido LibSPICE, Solido Generator and Solido Analytics. The solution delivers production-proven results for advanced-node standard cell, memory and custom IP libraries while reducing characterization turnaround times by more than 10X and achieving over a 5X to 10X reduction in token costs.

These agentic capabilities extend further into the custom IC design flow with the new Solido Layout Analyzer, an AI-powered measurement-aware solution for visualizing, exploring and analyzing parasitic and layout-dependent effects in post-layout designs. Integrated with Fuse EDA AI Agent, Solido Layout Analyzer dramatically boosts design quality and engineering productivity by enabling natural language prompting with results analysis, fixing recommendations, and report generation.

“For STMicroelectronics’ non-volatile memory team, the ability to relate layout insight directly to electrical behavior is critical. Rather than discovering layout dependent effects late in the process, Solido Layout Analyzer brings this analysis earlier into the flow, improving design confidence and helping cut down the time we spend debugging complex design blocks by weeks. We are planning to test and validate the advantages in our on-going design activity,” said Gianbattista Lo Giudice, Non-Volatile Memory Design manager, STMicroelectronics.

Accelerating digital verification with agentic AI

With verification consuming up to 70 percent of design time and complexity, the industry faces an unprecedented productivity crisis. Building on the recently announced Questa One Agentic Toolkit, Siemens is extending these domain-scoped agentic AI workflows with NVIDIA’s Nemotron 3 Ultra reasoning model, designed for complex, long-running agents. In agentic RTL benchmarking with the ACE-RTL agent, Nemotron 3 Ultra leads among open models. Its reasoning and efficiency help autonomous agents evaluate engineering trade-offs while continuously validating designs against golden test harness. This enables teams to identify issues earlier, accelerate verification closure, and deliver trusted outcomes faster.

“We’re at an inflection point where the complexity of AI chips, chiplets, and 3D ICs has outpaced traditional verification methodologies,” said Abhi Kolpekwar, senior vice president and general manager Digital Verification Technologies, Siemens EDA, Siemens Digital Industries Software, “agentic AI is the natural path forward that scales with this complexity—agents that can orchestrate multi-domain verification, reason across billions of test scenarios, and deliver production-quality results in timeframes that were impossible just two years ago.” path forward that scales with this complexity—agents that can orchestrate multi-domain verification, reason across billions of test scenarios, and deliver production-quality results in timeframes that were impossible just two years ago.”

Availability

Siemens’ expanded AI-driven EDA capabilities will be available in forthcoming releases of Siemens’ AI-native EDA portfolio. To learn more about how Siemens is bringing the power of Agentic AI to the EDA industry, visit https://www.siemens.com/en-us/products/fuse-eda-ai-system/agent/

Siemens Digital Industries Software helps organizations of all sizes digitally transform using software, hardware and services from the Siemens Xcelerator business platform. Siemens’ software and the comprehensive digital twin enable companies to optimize their design, engineering and manufacturing processes to turn today’s ideas into the sustainable products of the future. From chips to entire systems, from product to process, across all industries. Siemens Digital Industries Software – Accelerating transformation.

Siemens Digital Industries (DI) empowers companies of all sizes within the process and discrete manufacturing industries to accelerate their digital and sustainability transformation across the entire value chain. Siemens’ cutting-edge automation and software portfolio revolutionizes the design, realization and optimization of products and production. And with Siemens Xcelerator – the open digital business platform – this process is made even easier, faster, and scalable. Together with our partners and ecosystem, Siemens Digital Industries enables customers to become a sustainable Digital Enterprise. Siemens Digital Industries has a workforce of around 70,000 people worldwide.

Siemens AG (Berlin and Munich) is a leading technology company focused on industry, infrastructure, mobility, and healthcare. The company’s purpose is to create technology to transform the everyday, for everyone. By combining the real and the digital worlds, Siemens empowers customers to accelerate their digital and sustainability transformations, making factories more efficient, cities more livable, and transportation more sustainable. A leader in industrial AI, Siemens leverages its deep domain know-how to apply AI – including generative AI – to real-world applications, making AI accessible and impactful for customers across diverse industries. Siemens also owns a majority stake in the publicly listed company Siemens Healthineers, a leading global medical technology provider pioneering breakthroughs in healthcare. For everyone. Everywhere. Sustainably.

In fiscal 2025, which ended on September 30, 2025, the Siemens Group generated revenue of €78.9 billion and net income of €10.4 billion. As of September 30, 2025, the company employed around 318,000 people worldwide on the basis of continuing operations. Further information is available on the Internet at www.siemens.com.

Note: A list of relevant Siemens trademarks can be found here. Other trademarks belong to their respective owners.

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SOURCE Siemens Industry Software

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