Compliance Shouldn’t Arrive as a Surprise at the Border

This article is part of a broader conversation we are having at OneThread about what happens when global sustainability standards meet the realities of African businesses, and what it will take to make sure those businesses are not excluded from the next era of global trade.

I met this designer almost a year before she took the OneThread Sustainability Quotient. She probably doesn’t remember meeting me, but I remember her. I had been invited to an event where she gave a presentation about mohair and told the story of how the fibre came to South Africa, how the industry developed here, and how that history eventually became connected to the business she has spent nearly two decades building in the Eastern Cape. I had just returned from Semester at Sea, and it was around the time I had finally decided that OneThread was what I was going to build. I wasn’t completely sure what it would become yet, and I definitely didn’t know how I would eventually work with her. We spoke for maybe two minutes. But I remembered her.

Almost a year later, my team reached out and invited her to take our Sustainability Quotient. After completing it, she sent me an email that has stayed with me. She didn’t say that the questions were too intellectually difficult. Her concern was much more important than that. She told me that many of the questions did not seem designed for a small African business like hers. We were asking for information she didn’t have in the formats we were asking for it. There were questions where none of the answers seemed to describe how her business actually operated, and there were systems and records she had never previously been required to formalise. By the end of the assessment, she had concluded that what we were building was above her qualification level and, perhaps most painfully, that she might be a waste of OneThread’s time.

What bothered me wasn’t that she found our assessment difficult. What bothered me was that, for a moment, we had made her feel like she wasn’t doing enough.

Because everything I knew about her business suggested the opposite.

Her business operates in a rural part of the Eastern Cape, where she works with local women and builds income-generating skills around fashion and textile production. They work with mohair. They dye, source and produce within the realities of the community around them. Their environmental practices are not theoretical commitments sitting inside a corporate ESG report; many of them are practical necessities. Water matters because they rely on well water, which means what enters that water system matters because it is connected to the water people actually use. Materials matter because replacing something is not as simple as placing another order and expecting it to arrive tomorrow. Offcuts matter because fabric costs money and access is limited, so throwing usable material away makes very little sense.

The more we spoke, the more evidence I could hear of circularity, community engagement, material awareness and environmental responsibility. She told me they reuse dyes. They reuse offcuts. They work within local systems and resource constraints that naturally require them to think carefully about what they consume and discard. In fact, one of the problems she mentioned was that they generate so many different offcuts that she doesn’t currently have a practical system for tracking them. My immediate thought was not that she had failed at circularity. It was that we needed to find a better way to measure the circularity that was already happening.

That distinction sits at the heart of OneThread’s work: the difference between behaviour and structure.

A business can behave sustainably without having formal systems documenting those behaviours. You can reuse water without maintaining a water-use log. You can reuse fabric without calculating your material recovery rate. You can work collaboratively with women in your community without having formal community-governance documentation. You can know exactly where your materials come from because you have spent years working within that ecosystem without having every touchpoint mapped inside a digital traceability platform.

None of the paperwork makes the underlying behaviour more sustainable. But increasingly, the paperwork determines whether anybody outside your immediate ecosystem can verify that the behaviour happened.

That is what the OneThread Sustainability Quotient is actually testing. It is not asking whether you are a good person or whether you care about sustainability. It is not even solely asking whether sustainable behaviours exist inside your business. It is asking a much narrower and increasingly consequential question: if somebody required you to prove what you are doing tomorrow, how much could you prove?

Those questions produce very different answers.

When I replied to her email, I thanked her for being honest with me and asked if she would give me 30 minutes of her time. We ended up speaking for about 45 minutes. During that conversation, I asked where she was selling her products. She told me that she already exports internationally, including into European markets. At that point, the assessment stopped being an abstract sustainability exercise. The documentation gaps we had identified were connected to markets she had already spent years earning access to.

This is where the global sustainability conversation becomes much more complicated for African businesses. The infrastructure of international trade is changing. Product information, traceability, verification and increasingly digitised compliance systems are becoming more important. The European Union’s move toward Digital Product Passports is part of that wider transition. Whatever the precise implementation requirements ultimately look like for individual products and sectors, the direction of travel is clear: businesses selling into increasingly regulated markets will be expected to know more about their products and supply chains and to be able to substantiate more of what they claim.

Large multinational fashion companies will struggle with parts of this transition too. The difference is that many of them have compliance departments, lawyers, consultants, software budgets and employees whose entire job is regulatory preparation.

I think about businesses like hers.

Imagine spending almost twenty years learning your craft, building a business, developing products, creating employment, finding customers and accomplishing the already difficult task of getting an African fashion business into international markets. Then, while you are busy actually running that business, the infrastructure surrounding the market changes. Suddenly, knowing your suppliers is not enough; that knowledge needs to be structured. Reusing your materials is not enough; someone may need you to quantify it. Working responsibly with your community is not enough; the relationship may need documentation. Knowing where something came from because you have worked with the same people for years is not necessarily equivalent to traceability in a digital system.

She should not discover from a buyer, an export problem or a regulatory deadline that the rules of a market she has spent years selling into have changed.

Compliance shouldn’t arrive as a surprise at the border.

The answer, however, is not to lower the standard. I have said this before, and I will continue saying it: Africa does not need a lower bar. We need a stepping stone.

I think about this when I watch my children on the monkey bars. My son is eight and can climb up, grab the bars and start moving by himself. My daughter is six. She can do the monkey bars too, but sometimes I need to lift her high enough to reach them. Occasionally I need to support her for a moment until she has her grip. I don’t lower the monkey bars for her, and I don’t do the monkey bars on her behalf. I make sure she can reach the same bar.

That is the difference between equality and equity, and it is an important distinction when we talk about African businesses entering increasingly digitised global markets. We cannot tell a rural business with limited connectivity, multilingual teams, varying levels of digital literacy and operational systems built around entirely different realities to simply become a European corporation overnight. At the same time, pretending global requirements do not exist will not protect that business when it tries to export.

The work is in the middle. We have to build infrastructure that allows businesses to translate what they already do into the systems the global economy increasingly requires.

This designer had tried something similar before. She told me about working with larger organisations that had come in and told her she needed particular accounting systems and documentation. Requirements were effectively dropped on top of the business without enough consideration for how it actually functioned. She spent money, but the systems did not solve her problem. That experience matters to me because it is exactly what I do not want OneThread to become.

It is easy to build technology for an imagined African user. It is much harder to sit with an actual person and allow the reality of their business to challenge your assumptions. When she tells me that some people on her team are not comfortable using computers, that matters. When literacy and language affect how information can be recorded, that matters. When connectivity affects the way the business operates, that matters. When she tells me that tracking every offcut feels impossible with the systems available to her today, my response cannot simply be, “Well, the standard says you need to track it.”

My responsibility is to ask how we make that tracking possible.

Maybe that means using production patterns to calculate expected material usage and remaining material. Maybe it means simpler logging at Starter level, with increasing documentation as a business moves towards being Structured and eventually Verification Ready. Maybe it means designing systems around the information people can realistically capture today while creating a pathway towards what they will need tomorrow.

The destination does not need to change. The route does.

That is one of the clearest ways I can explain OneThread’s position: we do not argue with global standards. We argue that the pathway to meeting them must reflect African realities.

When I say this designer can be ready, I also want to be precise. I am not saying that completing the OneThread assessment suddenly makes her compliant with every future Digital Product Passport requirement. It does not. What the assessment gives us is visibility. We can see the gap between what she already does and what she can currently prove. And in her case, the most important thing is already there: the substance.

She has practices worth documenting. She has relationships, knowledge, production systems and sustainability behaviours embedded in the way her business works. What is missing is the infrastructure around them. Logging systems can be built. Evidence can be organised. Material tracking can improve. Governance can be documented. Sourcing information can be structured. Those are solvable problems.

In fact, I would rather begin there than with a company that has beautiful sustainability documentation and very little sustainable behaviour underneath it. You can build infrastructure around good practice. It is much harder to manufacture values that were never there.

By the end of our conversation, the woman who had emailed me believing she might be a waste of our time had invited me to the Eastern Cape to see how they actually work. She was also willing to consider joining our pilot. For me, that is the most important part of this story, and not because I convinced somebody to use OneThread. The conversation moved from “I don’t think this was built for me” to “come and see how we work.”

And I need to see how they work.

If we claim to be building sustainability infrastructure for African fashion, African fashion has to be allowed to shape that infrastructure. I cannot build the whole thing from a desk in Johannesburg. A European regulation cannot tell me everything I need to know about a production community in the Eastern Cape. Global standards can tell us what information ultimately needs to exist, but the people actually doing the work can teach us how that information can realistically be captured.

That is the bridge we are trying to build.

So no, I don’t want to make the assessment easier. I want to explain it better. I want to build better pathways from behaviour to structure, from structure to evidence, and from evidence to verification. I want a rural designer and a multinational fashion house to ultimately be capable of reaching the same bar, even if they require very different infrastructure to get there.

Because she was never a waste of our time. She is the reason the work matters.

The businesses already exist. The knowledge already exists. The sustainability already exists. Our job is to make sure the infrastructure exists too, so that businesses that have spent decades earning their place in global markets are not suddenly locked out simply because nobody prepared them for the next version of those markets.

We don’t need the bar lowered.
We need to make sure the people who have already earned the right to reach it have a way up.