In a moment that will echo across Africa’s creative corridors, Omoyemi Akerele, Founder of Lagos Fashion Week, has been announced as one of the five global winners of the 2025 Earthshot Prize, the world’s most influential environmental award, created to accelerate solutions to protect the planet.
The announcement was made at the Museum of Tomorrow in Rio de Janeiro, where Brazil’s Olympic icon Rebeca Andrade and Indigenous climate activist Txai Suruí revealed the winners before a global audience of leaders, innovators, culture shapers, and activists.
Lagos Fashion Week was awarded under the category “Build A Waste-Free World”, recognizing its decade-long work in reshaping African fashion through sustainability, textile innovation, circularity, and community-driven manufacturing.
From nearly 2,500 global nominations across 72 countries, Lagos Fashion Week emerged not only as the sole African finalist but the first-ever Nigerian platform in the fashion and textile space to receive the £1 million prize.
Lagos Fashion Week has spent years pushing designers beyond runway glamour into craftsmanship, local sourcing, ethical production, upcycling, regenerative dyeing, and artisan revival from Lagos to Kaduna to Abidjan. The platform built bridges — designers to farmers, tailors to global buyers, commerce culture.
Now the world is taking notes. Nigeria is influencing how the world thinks about fashion’s future.
Akerele’s Lagos Fashion Week now stands shoulder-to-shoulder with global climate champions like The High Seas Treaty, re.green, Friendship Bangladesh, and the City of Bogotá.
