Pakistan

Background

Gender Promotion through Skills Development in the Clothing/Garment Sector, or GEN-PROM, aims at enhancing the skill level of garment and sewing industry workers so that this important backbone industry of Pakistan can survive the tough challenges of global competition. The project is targeted at reducing unemployment while simultaneously increasing much needed skilled workforce efficiency for the garment industry.

GEN-PROM is being implemented by way of three inter-related project outputs:

To generate employment for women in the garment sector through training and re-training;

To build the capacity of the private sector to conduct research and advocate gender mainstreaming in the garment sector, and to promote policy incentivization whereby the industry will be encouraged to promote gender participation; and

To record best practices and disseminate the information for up-scaling skills development initiatives in the industry.
 

 Objectives

The aim of the project is to increase income and generate employment for garment workers, particularly women, affected by the changing international trade environment through skills development; carry out research and advocate gender mainstreaming in the garment sector, and by promoting policy incentivization whereby the industry will be encouraged to promote gender participation in the garment sector.

Key Achievements

605 Master Trainers and middle management professionals (150 females; 455 males)

282 Merchandisers (30 females; 252 males) and

17 Programme Coordinators  (local technical resource)

These trainings were conducted across 55 apparel and home textile stitching units located in Karachi, Lahore and Faisalabad.  

Out of 12,780 workers, 90% were first-time employees.  Similarly, the majority of Master Trainers were fresh graduates from textile institutions.

GENPROM successfully raised the monthly income of poor households by approximately PKR 100 million through skills development and training. More importantly 60% of this income was earned by freshly hired and trained women apparel workers.

Similarly, the GENPROM skills development initiative resulted is a win-win situation for the apparel and home textile manufacturing industry of Pakistan. The participating companies have improved their current productivity, efficiency and quality levels through employment of trained workers. In some cases an increase in production efficiencies and improvement in quality levels were around 15% - 20 % from the base value.