A New Fund Looks to Support Women Workers in Global Supply Chains
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TExtile workers in Huaibei, Anhui province, East China. Frame China/shutterstock
The pandemic was a stark reminder of the vagaries of supply and demand, and the workers that keep the engines humming. Why wasn’t personal protective gear arriving at our doors? What was holding up the hardware to help kids learn from home? And why was food insecurity blooming in even high-income countries?
One answer was global supply chains. Even small disruptions had the power to stop progress in its tracks. Production lines became front lines, providing essential food, clothing and technology while pressuring an already marginalized workforce.
The majority of those workers are women. Women represent three quarters of the 60 million to 70 million textile, clothing, and footwear supply chain workers. One in four working women are employed in agriculture, formally or informally. Most lack the social agency to have a voice on issues like the right to earn a living wage and access to healthcare.
Work’s underway to change that: The United Nations Foundation is launching the Resilience Fund for Women in Global Value Chains.
The fund will deploy the collective resources of forward-thinking companies to boost the long-term economic resilience, health and fortunes of women toiling to meet global demand. The collaboration has already gained support from the foundations of four leading apparel companies and hopes to attract funders from multiple sectors, including agriculture and tech.
Purpose and priorities
The fund will support locally led, women-centered solutions working toward twin goals: advancing a long-term, sustainable recovery for women working in global supply chains, and helping them drive systemic change at the community level. To do that, it’s upending the usual top-down approach. The fund is putting its trust and ambitions in the hands of the women and communities that will ultimately own their own priorities and solutions.
The shared governance approach is geared to deliver sustainable self-determination at the grassroots level. “If women can have full autonomy, they’ll have more options for future shocks,” says Seema Jalan, executive director of the U.N. Foundation’s Universal Access Project.
Housed within the project, the fund is launching in early spring with two partners: Business for Social Responsibility (BSR), a nonprofit network of 250 member companies that work toward a sustainable world, and Win-Win Strategies, a leader in building economic resilience for women.
A third of the funding will directly support local women’s groups in partner networks. Maria Bobenrieth, Win-Win’s executive director, says the organization is particularly excited about working with the fund and collaborating with corporate foundations and companies to “help build a more powerful model of funding for women’s and girls’ rights around the world.”
A movement gains speed
The fund is part of a rising movement to support workers’ rights globally. The emerging fair labor movement began making headway in 1998 with the adoption of the International Labor Organization’s (ILO) Declaration of Fundamental Principles and Rights. Almost a decade later, in 2019, the ILO adopted Convention 190 on the elimination of gender-based violence at work.
In September, a group of leading philanthropies launched FORGE, Funders Organized for Rights in the Global Economy, to align efforts around a global economic structure that works for all people. Initial funders included the Ford Foundation, Laudes Foundation, Open Society Foundations and Humanity United.
Corporate foundations have also been working to improve the circumstances of global supply chain workers. The Levi Strauss Foundation invests in the wellbeing of workers on apparel supply chains, most recently with a series of 15 grants focused on health and food security for women factory workers, a cohort it feels are “most vulnerable to economic shocks.” And the Walmart Foundation has funded many initiatives to support an overarching commitment to the dignity of workers.
Four founding funders
The new resilience fund has drawn four corporate foundations from the retail sector as its first investors: the Gap Foundation, the H&M Foundation, the VF Foundation and the PVH Foundation. For the first time, the companies are setting aside competing priorities to work toward a greater good they say can’t be achieved alone.
Gap Foundation Chair Julie Gruber says, “From the early stages of the pandemic, we knew that we had to leverage Gap Foundation’s experience and resources to address this global challenge, but it became clear that a collective industry effort would produce greater impact at the scale required to address the immense hardship brought on by COVID-19. Building this funding collaborative with other corporate foundations and NGO partners enables us to maximize our investment while supporting new, locally driven approaches to creating strong community resilience—allowing us to drive meaningful and systemic change.”
Diana Amini, global manager of H&M Foundation, ties the investment in women’s economic empowerment to reaching the U.N.’s SDG goals, a deadline that’s “quickly approaching.” Amini agrees that the fund’s work demands collective action. “No company or organization will be able to drive this agenda on their own; partnerships that combine different perspectives, sectors and kinds of knowledge is crucial.”
Gloria Schoch, director of the VF Foundation and Global Impact, points to worker inequity exposed by the pandemic, and the staying power of negative impacts. “The pandemic caused by the COVID-19 virus has illuminated the inequities and challenges women and girls face around the world. We believe that the innovative and grassroots collaborative approach of the Resilience Fund for Women in Global Value Chains will lift up women and girls in communities around the world for years to come.”
The work is also a natural fit with the priorities of the fourth partner, the PVH Foundation, which invests in improving the lives of women and children globally.
While the fund doesn’t focus on women in any particular supply chain, the first stage of funding is slated for the first quarter of 2021 in South Asia–with hopes of expanding to between five and eight regions heading toward 2022. Seema Jalen says the fund invites others to join its theory of change to reach its goal of up to $2 million for phase one, and $10 million in the long term.
