For 2025, Green Access explores how the continent’s rich heritage of craftsmanship can be reimagined as a tool for material innovation, youth development, and waste transformation not by closing the loop, but by keeping it open, adaptive, and regenerative. Designers are invited to rethink the use of pre and post-consumer textile waste as a design opportunity that taps into indigenous making practices, nurtures youth-driven micro-economies, and extends the life and value of materials through repair, reworking, and reinterpretation.

This year’s edition focuses on four key areas:

• Craft-Driven Material Innovation: Using local techniques such as weaving, embroidery, appliqué, beading, dyeing, and patching to transform discarded or surplus materials into high-value fashion objects.
• Reimagining Waste Streams: Experimenting with creative uses of pre-consumer (factory offcuts, deadstock) and post-consumer (used clothing, discarded textiles) waste through reconstruction, remanufacturing, and modular design.
• Youth Empowerment and Skill Activation: Collaborating with young apprentices, artisans, and vocational groups to co-create new materials or products, integrating training and income-generation opportunities.
• Accessories & Digital Exploration: Encouraging accessories designers and the use of digital fabrication tools to push innovation.

Green Access - How?

Designers discovered through Green Access represent the future of sustainable and circular fashion on the continent. Lagos Fashion Week uses this platform to amplify these voices.

• Young designers complete an online application that details their business and designs that focus on sustainability, youth empowerment, and heritage-based circularity.
• A panel selects the 5 finalists the 5 finalists are announced and invited to a hybrid programme combining virtual and physical sessions.
• The program runs as a hybrid format with three weeks of virtual sessions followed by practical workshops where designers develop capsule collections.

Who Should Apply?

Emerging designers, makers, or collectives based in or connected to Africa, working in apparel, accessories, or material innovation. Applicants should be committed to sustainability, youth empowerment, and heritage-based circularity, and open to collaboration, experimentation, and process transparency

Programme Activity & Highlights

Practical Training (Hybrid – Virtual and Physical):

The virtual component of the programme runs over three weeks, delivering industry-led sessions that equip participants with the knowledge to refine their ideas and prepare for production. During the physical residency sessions at NAHOUS, participants will focus on:

1. Fabric Sourcing
2. Fabric and Textile Design using Traditional Hand Dyeing Technique.
3. Garment Construction

Brand Building:

• Lagos Fashion Week

• Mentorship

• Publicity and PR

Apply for Green Access 2025 here; applications close on 11th September 2025.