Sustainability: creating training and employment opportunities for women
The United Nations’ 2030 Sustainable Development Goals include a commitment to “productive employment and decent work for all” and its Sustainable Development Agenda refers specifically to needing to generate “employment for vulnerable groups, specifically women”, as well as the “urban poor” and “low-income urban residents”.
According to the International Labour Organization, "decent work" is that where there are “opportunities for work that... [are] productive and deliver a fair income, security in the workplace and social protection for families” and “better prospects for personal development and social integration”.
It is these values which we think best reflect our vision to create beautiful collections that have originated from a desire to create meaningful training and employment opportunities for some of those women in the world and their families that need it the most.
And so, as we travelled far and wide across India, from the northern state of Punjab to the heart of several slum communities in the southern state of Karnataka, we persevered.
We talked to, brainstormed with, and worked to try to persuade all manner of different women's organisations of our vision, to see whether we could work together to introduce new training and employment opportunities for local women. We invested in donating to, and in cleaning and furnishing rooms within, local women's organisations, to enable us to host local open days, interview days and training days for women from all walks of life. We travelled far and wide in pursuit of sewing machines, fabrics and other equipment we purchased so that we could test whether our vision could become a reality. We provided vision tests and glasses and ran local interviews and paid training workshops, so that we could give the women with whom we were meeting a chance to attend and participate meaningfully in the "IKTIYAR project".
This went on for some years as we continued to engage in paid training initiatives for some hundreds of training pieces, both on the ground in India and remotely from London.
We learned a lot along the way! Inevitably, not every person or organisation we engaged with lacked an ulterior motive or fully shared our vision to invest in the social and economic empowerment of women. And it was difficult, in more ways than one, as we continued to search for a group of women in whom we felt we could trust, and in whom we could continue to invest, to cultivate our luxury sustainable fashion vision.
We are thrilled to have now produced our first collection of shift dresses, the Shift Collection, with a women forming part of a World Fair Trade Organisation located in the heart of three major slum communities in South India.
The organisation invests in providing training and employment opportunities for women from its local slum communities, including those that have been and are vulnerable to abuse and discrimination.
As well as focusing on training and employment opportunities, the organisation provides women with clean and safe working conditions, regular computer classes and English classes, and ongoing medical and emotional support, services from which its community of women and their children benefit greatly.
Building on their existing skills, we are proud to have invested in many thousands of hours of training and training piece production, ahead of going on to produce our first Shift Collection with this fantastic organisation and truly wonderful group of women.
Through a combination of over a year of providing both on the ground and remote training, it feels incredibly rewarding to have invested in upskilling and training a group of women to produce entirely by-hand, from start to finish, tailored shift dresses made from pure silk, for our first ever collection.
Research from the Good Business Lab shows that training low-income female garment workers, not only technically but also in soft skills , empowers empowers them with greater financial agency and bargaining power in the workplace and in their households. And according to the World Food Programme, when women and girls earn, they invest 90% of their earnings in their families and communities.
And so, in circumstances where the opportunities for furthering the social and economic empowerment of vulnerable women are few and far between, with little welfare support to fall back on, and women's training and progression all too often dismissed as “impossible” or worse, “unnecessary”, we couldn't be more certain of why it matters to know and care about "who made your clothes" (Fashion Revolution), and proud to have produced our first collection with this phenomenal group of women.
Images: IKTIYAR, India 2016-2018