The RAGS Challenge Fund ran from 2010 to 2013, and was funded by UK aid from the Department for International Development (DFID).
“Working Together for a Responsible Ready-Made Garment Sector” is the final report of the RAGS Challenge Fund. The report is intended to be a vehicle for sharing the lessons learned during the life of RAGS for a number of audiences, such as government entities, NGOs, trade unions etc.
The process to capture the lessons learned consisted of the submission of reports by individual implementing organisations, followed up by interviews with key informants involved in project implementation, as well as the experience and observations made by the the organisation appointed by DFID to manage the allocated project funds (Maxwell Stamp PLC).
RAGS Lessons Learned – Overview
The report lays out, as said, the lessons learned across the different RAGS projects individually. It then closes with a list of overall recommendations for the different types of stakeholder organisations in the project such as government, unions etc.
The meta-learnings, i.e. the learnings that can be distilled from the individual project learnings however have been less of a focus in the report. I therefore would like to summarise a few of them hereafter.
As will become evident, they are so ‘common’, indeed common sense, that it is surprising that they repeat in nearly every report on project similar to RAGS.
- Scalability implies the use of grassroots approaches. However, not all grassroots approaches end up scaling well.
There exist multiple examples. Among those listed in the report, the workers’ cafés – intended to educate women workers of Bangladeshi garment factories on their labour rights – worked well conceptually, but the lack of enough facilitators reduced it’s impact considerably. -
Education and awareness building is fundamental.
Or in other words: the surprising result is that an individual’s awareness about his/her rights is not necessarily a given. In fact, it is mostly absent.
Educating people about what their legal rights are is a – relatively – easy win for them, and a powerful weapon to change an industry as well as a country’s law enforcement and practise. - Women are at (often) at the bottom of the worker food chain – yet measures must be inclusive in order to remedy the situation.
It may look/be essential to invest the gros of efforts and funds into education and training women. However, unless their (few) male colleagues, and (many) male supervisors are consciously included into any education program, the outcomes will fall short of their potential. - Terms vs. concepts vs. ‘operational processes’
Unions have a very bad rep in many developing countries. Sometimes for a reason, often though more for the an inherent fear of what they could trigger in a worst case scenario.
However, the collaborative function – workers sitting around a table with owners / supervisors and discussing not only wage but also H&S or efficiencies – has a huge positive potential.
Terminology may actually inhibit the ultimate goal … hence adjusting to the cultural context within which terms such as ‘unions’ are perceived, and instead focusing on the common interest and express those, could thaw the fronts, and move the boat forward.
At the end of the day, the nearly all-encompassing validity of the above insights is a surprising non-suprise. This in the sense that nearly every report on a project such as RAGS ultimately comes to the same conclusions.
The devil lies in the practise – turning the above insights into operationally successful, accepted and appreciated realities is and remains the crux.
