Keren Pybus spent 25 years in sourcing, merchandising, and retail operations, including three years in Bangladesh running a major UK retailer's sourcing office, close enough to the global garment trade to know how it treats the people who sew the clothes. Paloma Schackert came from Bain & Company and monitoring and evaluation work with NGOs across West Africa and India, convinced that jobs for women change communities. In 2015 the two believers founded Ethical Apparel Africa to run garment manufacturing where quality, integrity, and the wellbeing of workers are not competing priorities. They are the point.

In 2021 EAA acquired Maagrace Garment Industries in Koforidua and quickly created 500 jobs, growing it into the second largest garment factory in Ghana and the country's largest solar-powered one. Today between 950 and 1,200 people work there, earn about four times the local wage, and produce export orders that pass the audits international brands require, including SEDEX SMETA and WRAP. Talanton's investment, its first in Ghana, supports the plan to grow the workforce to 2,000 by 2030.

Garment manufacturing has a long record of paying as little as the market allows. EAA runs the same business on a different premise: pay a living wage, train deliberately, and promote women into management. Women already hold more than 45 percent of management roles, with a target of 70 percent, and the company commissioned independent living wage research to verify its own pay claims. Worker programs cover health, digital literacy, and a three-year wellbeing initiative with the Levi's Foundation.

The results show in careers like Bernice Gabienu's. Recruited as a trainee machinist in 2019, she was promoted to Mechanic Supervisor within three months, overseeing a team and an automated needle-issuance system in a field her peers considered closed to women. EAA's wider mission is 10,000 manufacturing jobs in West Africa by 2030, more than 70 percent of them held by women.