Dag: 31. oktober 2021

The purpose of this project is to strengthen both sustainability and climate change resilience in the South African wool industries through improving the productivity and quality of poor communal wool farmers, capacity building of factory workers and increased market access, so that the wool industry can provide a living income and secure decent jobs in some of the poorest provinces in South Africa.

 

This project will build on recommendations from ETNs previous work in South Africa. The local implementing partner will be the National Wool Growers Association (NWGA) and their constituent farmer associations. NWGA represent almost 25000 farmers, of which 20000 are communal farmers.

 

The project will strengthen NWGAs existing work to support and represent communal farmers, including institutional development of the farmers’ local representative structures, with a particular focus on increasing women leadership. NWGA field officers’ and other support officers’ capacity on elements like CC resilience building and new market sustainability standards will be increased, with the aim of helping communal farmers improve the quality and sustainability of their wool production making them capable of supplying to the international market and new standards.

 

The project aims at providing an intervention model that can be replicated to support communal wool farmers in other areas of South Africa and be catalytic to secure funds from international and national sources.

 

An additional element will be collaboration with the Southern African Clothing and Textile Workers’ Union (SACTWU) on training of workers in wool processing factories and brokerage firms in to develop their skills to impact positively on the industry as a whole in the region. The project will facilitate contact between the market and the producers to use market mechanisms to promote sustainable farming practices in SA.

The Joint Ethical Trading Initiatives (JETI) have been working in Bangladesh since 2014, implementing a social dialogue (SD) programme to facilitate and improve dialogue between workers and management, while building workers’ ability to represent their needs. The programme is supported by Norad (until Dec. 2020), the UK FCDO, HSBC and the Dutch Government (expected 2021).

 

In the Bangladeshi context, with continued repression of civil society, including trade union activity, the SD approach serves an important role in facilitating democratic processes in the workplace, which in turn contribute to building the foundations for democratic processes in society as a whole.

 

In the next phase of the programme, we seek to further strengthen the role of our partner ETI Bangladesh in their role as a facilitator of social dialogue at factory, as well as at industry level. With their strong multi-stakeholder networks, ETI Bangladesh is uniquely placed to address the sustainability of the ready-made garment sector in Bangladesh, through decent work and climate resilience.

 

The pandemic has hit garment workers in Bangladesh hard, more than 60 per cent of whom are women. At the same time, Bangladesh is one of the countries’ most vulnerable to climate change. The proposed project will build on the existing SD programme, with a focus on intersecting challenges related to the future of work, including decent work, gender equality and climate resilience. Specifically, the project will:

 

• Strengthen the role and sustainability of ETI Bangladesh as a facilitator of stakeholder dialogue
• Empower women textile workers to take on leadership roles as part of management and as worker representatives in industrial relations.
• Drive innovative, collaborative and knowledge-based solutions to build resilience to the impact of climate change on textile workers.
• Strengthen collaborative platforms by communicating recommendations related to the future of work and support their implementation.

The complex, global supply chain of cashew nuts sustains livelihoods in all parts of the world, from farmers in West Africa through processing in South East Asia to retail worldwide. Global production of cashew nuts has grown by 6% annually during the last decade and a quarter of the world’s cashew nuts are grown in Cote d’Ivoire. Less than 10% of the nuts grown in West Africa are processed here, the rest is exported for processing mainly in Vietnam and India.

Despite the potential of this product, many challenges remain particularly at the farmer and processing levels of the supply chain with regards to sustainability, working conditions and living income. At farmer level, poor representation and volatile commodity prices often force farmers to sell their nuts at rates inferior to living income, and the lack of skills in sustainable agricultura practices compromises environmental standards, productivity and quality. As for processing units, fragmented local SMEs struggle with an unequal power balance relative to the global supply chain dominated by large players and fail to access a steady supply of raw material.

Inades Formation, an Ivorian NGO that for decades has worked to empower rural communities through capacity development will in this project target sustainability and livelihood challenges at farmer and SME processor level. Through creating new linkages between the stakeholders in the Ivorian cashew sector, improving representation of farmers through strengthening farmers’ organisations and building technical capacity in marginalised communities, the project seeks to improve sustainability performance and market access for smallholder farmers and SME processors. Ethical Trade Norway and its retail members will lift learnings from the Ivorian context upstream the supply chain and allow for stakeholder dialogue on human rights and environmental due diligence of buyers and retailers as well as new direct linkages between processors and European buyers.