CARE’s Made by Women initiative aims to support changes across the garment industry by promoting improved practices in global supply chains, strengthening women’s leadership, and working with governments to promote public policies.
About the project
The Made by Women strategy is currently being conducted in Cambodia, focusing on three important areas: Empowered Women, Protected Workers, and Ethical Supply Chains. CARE believes that dignified work can be achieved when women mobilize collectively for change, workers are protected by inclusive policies recognizing their rights and protection, and with businesses better practices adhering to effective policy and system changes.
In collaboration with Steve Madden, the project expands and scales up activities into factories, in addition to the current support under the initiative. CARE collaborates with local civil society to enhance their capacity for significant and sustainable changes, particularly in gender equality, monitoring and evaluation, financial management, and good governance. This involves leveraging the local expertise of implementing partner NGOs, with CARE overseeing and coordinating the project while a pre-selected local implementing partner NGO handles the project’s in-factory activities.
Project Objective:
The objective of the project is to strengthen factory participation in advocacy, collaboration, and awareness-raising on worker well-being centered on Made by Women focuses of Empowered Women, Protected Workers, and Ethical Supply Chains. The project supports targeted factory shifts in mindset and attitude toward higher attention to worker well-being as an important investment through two objectives.
- Strengthen existing gender equity, workplace environment, policies, and systems to enable a responsive and sustainable framework in factories.
- Improved collaboration, planning, and commitment to take action to improve respect for the rights of women working by stakeholders in the garment industry.
Focus:
The project aims for impacts to reach the main focus areas:
- Female workers’ voice and leadership: strengthening female leadership and promoting opportunities for female workers to progress as leaders in the industry.
- Gender-Based Violence and Harassment: Educating workers on the perceptions of gender roles and norms, the prevention of gender-based violence, and sexual harassment in factories.
- Economic Resilience: Enable and empower workers to better manage their household finances and decision-making processes.
- Health, Sanitation, and Nutrition: To improve the knowledge, behaviors, and choices of factory workers in relation to sexual reproductive and maternal health (SRMH), hygiene, and nutrition.
- Social Protection and Workers Rights: Enable workers to be aware of the social protection schemes and available benefits, their eligibility requirements, and their accessibility.
Project Activities:
- Conduct dialogues circles with workers and factory management teams to prompt discussion and feedback on working conditions, workers’ rights, and the quality of essential services offered by factories.
- Training the factory training team on focused areas and planned project activities
- Provide management and supervision capacity strengthening, including effective communications, stress management, and gender.
- Orient factories to relevant focus area guidebooks and tools, supporting factories to make plans to fill gaps and improve the management of infirmaries and linkages to outside facilities.
- Conduct coaching and mentoring for factory training teams to monitor and evaluate the impact of their activities.
- Support factory management teams to map out the well-being services and resources currently available within factories and in the garment industry.
- Support factories to establish and improve necessary policies and systems adhering to Cambodian law while ensuring appropriate workers’ input and representation.
- Support coaching for factory management teams to engage in advocacy for worker well-being at the factory and the industry level.
- Facilitate factory dialogues through consultations and events with governments and stakeholders on preventing of Gender-Based Violence and Harassment and worker well-being.
- Factories should publicly commit to campaigns and include strategies linked to the outcomes of the focus areas.