Garment worker at a Bangladesh factory. Credit: B A Sujan/Map/IPS

Australia’s largest textile workers’ union and activist groups are up in arms that the country’s leading retail chains, who source most of their fashion labels from Bangladesh, are refusing to sign a legally binding accord that will help to improve labour and safety standards in Bangladeshi garment factories.

Local Bangladeshi unions and international human rights groups have approached international clothing manufacturers to join the global initiative for improved building and safety conditions following the collapse of the eight-storey Rana Plaza on Apr. 24 that killed almost 1,200 factory workers.

As a result, the proposed Bangladesh Building and Fire Safety Agreement requires companies to conduct independent safety inspections, make their reports on factory conditions public and cover the costs for needed repairs.

It also requires them to stop doing business with any factory that refuses to make safety upgrades and to allow workers and their unions to have a voice in factory safety.

Major Australian retail chains that source garments from Bangladesh, like Kmart, Target, David Jones and Big W, have not been connected with the Rana Plaza tragedy; but in the spirit of creating a global culture of ethical production, labour unions and rights groups like Oxfam Australia are urging them to sign the agreement.

According to their annual reports, Target Australia’s total revenue in 2012 was about 70 billion dollars, while Kmart, which runs 170 retail outlets across Australia, had revenues of roughly 3.8 billion that same year. Big W (a branch of Woolworths) increased their sales revenues by almost five percent last year to 53 billion dollars.

“Those companies need to (publicise) what they’re making in Bangladesh and they need to be completely transparent about their supply chain,” said Michele O’Neil, national secretary of the Textile, Clothing and Footwear Union of Australia (TCFU).

To date, “No Australian company has agreed to publish the location of their supplier factories,” Oxfam Australia’s Labour Rights Coordinator Daisy Gardener told IPS.

“This is important because it would allow independent verification of conditions by researchers, NGOs or unions who could visit the factory site and speak to the workers about wages, health and safety and other issues.”

She said it was “important that all Australian companies sourcing from Bangladesh” sign onto the accord, which gives workers the right to refuse dangerous working conditions.

It is possible that if the accord had existed prior to Apr. 24, the death toll would have been significantly lower: days before the disaster, huge cracks had appeared on the ceilings and beams of the building, which was intended to house just five floors.

Despite these clear signs, and warnings from engineers that a collapse might be inevitable, factory managers threatened workers with dismissal if they stayed away due to safety concerns.

Thirty international companies, including the Italian fashion brand Benetton, Spanish retailer Mango and British retailer Marks & Spencer, have so far initialed the binding agreement, along with other big names like Tesco and PVH (the parent company of Tommy Hilfiger and Calvin Klein).

In an angry email response to IPS’ queries, Kmart’s general manager of corporate affairs and sustainability, Tracie Walker, said, “We have not refused to sign the accord.” She referred IPS to the company’s “strong ethical sourcing code”, which is supported by “very stringent policies.”

Kmart says that none of the recent tragedies in Bangladesh occurred in factories that make clothes for them. The company says it organised a forum with its suppliers and auditors, and has also visited factories there.

“One of the key outcomes of the audit process was the identification of ‘high risk buildings’, which are those located above market places and factories located in multi-storey buildings with shared ownership,” the company noted. “Kmart no longer places orders with factories in these high risk locations.”

But activists like O’Neill do not believe that “brand-specific codes, self-regulation and private sector audits” will do the job, echoing activists in the U.S. who say refusals to sign the accord amount to admissions that companies “do not want to be held accountable for workers’ safety.”

According to O’Neill, only consumers have the power to force retail chains to sign the labour accord.

“The results of not having strong laws and unions is clear: look no further than Rana Plaza,” O’Neill noted in a statement on TCFU’s website. “Companies that search the globe to find the lowest labour costs cannot claim ignorance (of) the consequences of that decision.”

About 49 percent of Bangladesh’s population lives below the poverty line. Desperation drives many, particularly women, to seek work in one of the country’s 5,000 factories, taking on 10-hour shifts, seven days a week, in exchange for little more than 30 dollars a month.

Speaking on ABC national radio, Bret Inder, a development economist at Melbourne’s Monash University, said that Bangladesh has grown to be the world’s second biggest garments manufacturer precisely because it offers such a cheap workforce.

“Western buyers have been contracting out to producers all over, particularly in Southeast Asia and South Asia, moving from one country to the next (in search of) the cheapest labour,” he noted.

“There’ll be another country waiting in the queue if Bangladesh prices itself out of the market. To make an accord that is specific to Bangladesh doesn’t make any sense at all,” he added.

Others argue that Bangladesh is a special case that deserves targeted policies. Since 2005, at least 1,800 garment workers have perished in factory fires and building collapses, according to research by the International Labour Rights Forum.

The incident on Apr. 24, the industry’s worst disaster in history, came just months after a fire at a different factory, in November 2012, killed 112 workers.

Oxfam believes that the Better Factories Cambodia project, through which Cambodia gets easy access to U.S. markets in exchange for improved working conditions in the garment sector, may be a good model for Australia to follow.

“There have been international calls for garment companies to ensure they are paying factories enough to ensure workers (receive) a living wage,” notes Oxfam’s Gardener. “The Australian government can help educate Australian businesses about their responsibility to uphold the human rights of the people working in their supply chains.”

She added that the labour cost compared to the overall retail price is very small, sometimes just a few cents per garment, meaning Australian retail companies are able to pay their suppliers more without it having a significant impact on their bottom dollar.

UNFPA, the United Nations Population Fund, has been privileged to participate in these conferences, and looks forward to joining multilateral organisations, NGOs and global leaders for the third Women Deliver conference in Kuala Lumpur this weekend.

Dr. Babatunde Osotimehin. Credit: UNFPA

Our focus this year will be on two issues that affect not just women and girls, but development in general, because research shows that voluntary family planning and maternal health are two key vectors for lifting developing nations out of poverty.

We will unveil new initiatives for each and seek to galvanise the world community for both programmatic and financial support. UNFPA has promoted voluntary family planning since it began operations in 1969, and if we have learned anything in the decades since, it is that the ability of women to plan when and at what intervals they will have children is essential to national progress in everything from education to health to economic prosperity.

Equally important, we have learned that family planning is about more than just condoms and other family planning commodities. It’s about human rights, information and education.

At the Women Deliver conference, UNFPA will launch a new partnership with the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) to increase access to family planning in some of the world’s most hard-to-reach areas. In cooperation with IPPF, we will seek to galvanise political commitments from 13 nations with statistically low contraceptive prevalence rates in order to increase support for programmes to educate women and men about the benefits of family planning.

UNFPA’s second major initiative will actually take place in the days leading up to Women Deliver, when we will co-host a symposium on the crucial, frontline role midwives play in lowering maternal deaths, reducing disabilities related to childbirth, and improving overall national health indicators.

More than 230 midwives will be joined by leading U.N. agencies, civil society representatives, policy makers and officials from donor nations to discuss ways to increase the numbers and improve the skills of midwives in developing countries.

At the symposium, UNFPA, alongside its partners from Intel, the World Health Organization and Jhpiego, the NGO affiliated with Johns Hopkins University, will roll out a new online training module for frontline maternal health workers to help train them to deal with issues such as pre-eclampsia, excessive post-birth bleeding and prolonged and obstructed labour. These medical complications can be matters of life and death for women giving birth in the developing world, so this is a critically important initiative.

But it is clear that these family planning and maternal health initiatives will succeed only if they are embraced by government leaders in a position to fund and support them. And there are often obstacles to that embrace.

The first obstacle, of course, is money. Governments struggling to meet the basic needs of their citizens face severe competition for scarce resources. But family planning and maternal health are so critically important to long-term development that they should be among the top spending priorities for developing nations’ governments.

And because helping underdeveloped nations rise out of poverty is so vital to international security and the global economy, voluntary family planning and maternal health should be investment priorities for developed nations as well.

The second obstacle standing in the way of family planning initiatives, in particular, are some cultural practices. The sad fact is that some societies still deny the human rights of half of their populations in the name of cultural traditions that do physical, social and psychological damage to women and girls.

As UNFPA sees it, the time has long passed when men can or should be allowed to dictate the reproductive rights of women. Young girls should not be forced into marriage. Sex should always be un-coerced. And every woman should have the means to enjoy her human right and freedom to choose if or when she will have children, and how many she will have.

We will be raising these issues at Women Deliver in Kuala Lumpur, and I hope all who attend will come away from the conference with a re-energised commitment to the central role these issues play in humanity’s future and to address the challenges of family planning and maternal health forthrightly.

*Dr. Babatunde Osotimehin is a United Nations Under-Secretary-General and Executive Director of UNFPA, the United Nations Population Fund.

CFBC Professor Dr. Leighton Naraine in the plant research facility at the college. Credit: Desmond Brown/IPS

As Caribbean communities grapple with the entwined challenges of climate change and food security, modern technologies offer hope that the region’s stagnating agricultural sector can be made more profitable.

For the past six years, the University of Central Florida (UCF) has teamed up with the St. Kitts-based Clarence Fitzroy Bryant College (CFBC) to implement a climate change education project for sustainable development in the region.

The institutions are reporting “tremendous success” using hydroponics, organoponics and hybrid-ponics, techniques that they insist are far more cost-effective.

“Climate change affects us all and one of the areas that we are most vulnerable is in the field of food security, namely agriculture. So my task as part of this team was to develop models to test various scenarios to see which one would be the most significant,” Stuart La Place, a lecturer at CFBC told IPS.

“Strawberries don’t usually grow in these climates but we have managed to grow them successfully and we are still growing them at the moment,” he said.

Hydroponics is a technique used to grow plants without soil, instead using mineral nutrient solutions in water.

The organoponics technique involves using a single layer of soil, sand, manure and potting soil for planting vegetables. La Place noted “this is being implemented in St. Kitts on a large scale at the moment.”

Hybridponics, he explained, “is a scenario we created at the college that lends itself to starting the initial growing techniques in hydro and then transplanting into the organo beds and we have had significant results.”

Former CFBC student Candace Richards agrees these methods are more cost-effective and profitable than traditional agriculture.

Noting that for a 20 by 20-foot plot, the hydroponic system costs 2,000 dollars to set up and the organoponics system 3,703 dollars, she said it’s “a worthy investment” since the estimated annual profits are in the region of 66,660 dollars after all costs are deducted. In comparison, a plot of the same size devoted to traditional agriculture produces approximately 740 dollars per month profit.

“This is better than traditional agriculture that requires more land space, is more labour intensive and presents challenges that can yield fewer crops,” Richards told IPS, pointing to the added advantage of having crops all year round rather than on a seasonal basis under traditional agriculture.

Using the organoponics method, it takes 45 days to get lettuce from seed to maturity, using 9.1 gallons of water; while with hydroponics, from a seed the lettuce takes 25 days to mature and uses significantly less water because it’s in a circulation system. The water keeps moving around and the only way out of that system is through the plant.

Growing lettuce the traditional way – planting in the ground – the growth cycle from a seed to maturity is 55 days and uses 11.3 gallons of water for a single plant from a dripper that delivers 50 milliletres per minute.

Each summer a group of UCF students visit St. Kitts and Nevis through the President’s Scholars programme at UCF to work with students at faculty at CFBC.

Charlene Kormondy was among 11 UCF students who travelled to St. Kitts and Nevis in 2012 under the programme.

“I was part of the agro technology team and our product was to build a shade house now known as the CFBC plant research facility,” she told IPS.

“When we got to St. Kitts we worked alongside students from St. Kitts and Nevis, CFBC professors and members of the local community to construct the shade house.

“It’s an example of action learning, implanting something that is a solution to a problem in the community and also generating knowledge about how to build these shade house systems and how to make agriculture more sustainable in the face of climate change, which you know could have temperature and precipitation impacts which could adversely affect crop production,” she said.

Now that the facility is up and running, Kormondy said it provides many tangible benefits to the community, including health benefits because the plants and vegetables grown there are substitutes for less healthy foods.

She said it can also lead to greater independence from foreign imports, and even gender equality.

“Women and children are the ones who are most vulnerable to climate-related disasters and socio-economic impacts, and this kind of agricultural system allows women to participate in agriculture but also have enough energy to devote to their role as primary caregivers and that’s because the growth of these plants are more efficient,” Kormondy said.

Another UCF student, Jessica Gottsleben, noted that a rise in tourism has led the economy and lucrative jobs to be less focused on agriculture, and food imports now exceed exports by a factor of four to one.

“Food supply is vulnerable from these climate-related disruptions,” she noted, adding that in future years the programme will seek to create local leaders from the youth being brought into the agricultural and business communities to increase self-sufficiency and resilience.

“The partnership has the potential to create jobs in existing sectors of agriculture and also create innovation in fostering jobs in areas such as agro tourism, agro processing, marketing, collecting evidence-based social data,” Gottsleben told IPS.

Sixteen CFBC students are currently registered in the programme and are trained in building the hydroponic system.

But UCF Professor Dr. Kevin Meehan said they are getting the wider community involved through what’s known as ‘The Take Five Programme’ that was implemented in February last year.

“We used a publicity campaign in print and electronic media to invite the general public as well as CFBC faculty to come to the campus to bring five containers (hence the name take five) and we would drill drainage holes in the containers, fill them with nutrient rich potting soil and then put in seedlings and then they would take those home to cultivate those buckets.”

Some 52 participants showed up over the course of three days at the CFBC campus.

“A second round of ‘Take Five’ was driven by the students and they adapted it as an outreach competition to the primary schools throughout the Federation,” Meehan said.

With funding from the Organisation of American States under the Special Multilateral Fund of the Inter-American Council for Integral Development, Dr. Meehan said they are now getting ready to implement the programme in Barbados, Trinidad, Guyana and at two separate locations in Haiti.

The UCF and CFBC representatives participated in a two-day UNESCO Sub-Regional Meeting on the environment and climate in Nevis on May 15 and 16.

It was organised by UNESCO in collaboration with the St. Kitts and Nevis National Commission on UNESCO and the Nevis Island Administration to support national adaptation policies to climate change in the Small Island Developing States of the Caribbean.

Burqas fail to shield many Afghan women from daily harassment, both in the street and at the workplace. Credit: Shelly Kittleson/IPS

While global attention is fixed on the scheduled pullout of U.S. and NATO troops from Afghanistan in 2014, women here have a much more immediate concern: how will they survive another day at work?

Having a job is now considered a routine aspect in the lives of many women around the world, but here, female employees are forced to navigate entrenched sexist and patriarchal attitudes, dodge sexual advances, and live with memories of harassment, abuse and even rape.

Last month, the international watchdog Human Rights Watch drew attention to the plight of Afghan policewomen who were being raped and harassed on the job due largely to a lack of gender-segregated bathroom facilities.

A flurry of press coverage ensued, drawing the ire of the Interior Ministry, which grudgingly promised to take action but has yet to implement any concrete safety measures or bring the perpetrators to justice.

In the face of apparent indifference on the part of many officials to a growing trend of sexual abuse in the workplace, one branch of the government has stepped up, drafting a set of anti-harassment guidelines that, if enforced, all employees will be required to abide by.

Spearheaded by 26-year-old Matin Bek, deputy director of Afghanistan’s Independent Directorate for Local Governance (IDLG) and the youngest deputy minister in the country, the draft regulations acknowledge that workplace safety is a fundamental right and provide women with mechanisms to seek redress should this right be violated.

The son of a mujahedeen leader credited with fighting to keep girls’ schools open in his northern Takhar province during years of civil strife from the late 1970s until the end of the Taliban era in 2001, Bek is well aware of the challenges that lie ahead.

In a country where most women languishing in prison are there for committing so-called “moral crimes” – such as having been raped, leaving abusive marriages or choosing their own partners  – he recognises that attempts to improve workplace safety may be perceived by some as “quixotic.”

But, as Bek tells IPS, he grew up in an “entirely different environment” to the urban patriarchal landscape. Since his father’s untimely death in a bomb blast in late 2011 he has been helping to dismantle the patronage networks that have traditionally been responsible for appointing district governors.

The IDLG now promotes a professional, merit-based body of civil servants accountable to the constitution.

This year, his ministry chose the date of Mar. 13, in honour of International Women’s Day on Mar. 8, to institute the anti-harassment guidelines as a national commitment to stop “treating women as commodities,” Bek said.

The guidelines define harassment as either verbal or physical intimidation, including unnecessary physical contact or drawing attention to an employee’s “sex appeal’’. Employers are obliged to follow up on complaints made via email or telephone and take disciplinary action against the perpetrators.

Economic benefits of workplace safety

The threat of rape, harassment and the “loss of honour” are thought to play a bigger role in keeping Afghan women at home than religious motivations.

Sexual harassment is pervasive in the country’s larger cities, like the capital Kabul, the northern city of Mazar-e Sharif and the western city of Herat. One NGO worker who did not wish to be named told IPS the harassment she faced in the capital was so extreme that she left the country in search of work elsewhere.

“I couldn’t take it anymore,” she said.

A large part of the female workforce is employed in the government sector, but even here women are far outnumbered by their male counterparts: last year the Reuters news service reported that out of a total of 363,000 state employees, only 74,000 were women.

According to a report by the World Bank, the labour participation rate of women over the age of 15 years was 14.4 percent in 2012, compared to 80 percent for men.

Increasingly, even this small portion of women who are able to secure jobs are being forced by their male relatives to stay home, or are doing so out of fear of being attacked on the job.

This trend, according to Bek, is a dangerous one, as a result of which entire communities suffer significant economic losses: in a country where per capita GDP is about 1,000 dollars, a woman’s salary can mean the difference between healthy and malnourished children, or between sending youth to school versus forcing them into child employment.

Thus the new anti-harassment regulations, implemented in hundreds of local government offices under the IDLG’s beat, aim not only to raise respect for individual rights within Afghan society but also to foster economic growth, Bek said.

Various studies show that women’s participation in the workforce and in leadership positions play a vital role in economic and overall development.

One such report claims that if female employment rates were to match male rates, Japan could see a rise in GDP of nine percent, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) of 12 percent and Egypt of 34 percent.

If women were allowed to concentrate on their jobs instead of looking for ways to avoid harassment, molestation and violence, their potential to the Afghan economy could be “vast,” Bek noted, adding that women’s participation in economic activities could also contribute to overall stability in the region, as fears of “chaos” and even civil war proliferate ahead of the 2014 departure of Western troops.

Entrenched sexism

Despite ample evidence on the need for such guidelines, enforcing them will not be easy. Reports of misconduct by public officials often meet with accusations that such claims by women or their advocates “insult the honour’’ of the alleged perpetrators or the public institutions to which they belong.

For example, the Apr. 25 HRW report on the need for safe bathroom facilities for Afghan policewomen provoked the wrath of the Interior Ministry, which demanded the rights group “apologise” for its findings.

HRW Afghanistan Researcher Heather Barr told IPS that the ministry “seems determined to claim that there have never been any cases of sexual harassment, sexual assault or rape of female police officers by male police officers.”

The government of President Hamid Karzai had set itself the goal of recruiting 5,000 women into the Afghan National Police (ANP) before 2014 to boost the miserable one percent female participation rate that currently exists.

Barr says this move is crucial, since most Afghan women are too frightened to report rape to male officers and cannot be searched by them. But, she said, the Interior Ministry’s attitude towards reports of rape and harassment could “harm efforts to recruit female police.”

Shaheen Begum receives skills training at the PPC paraplegic centre in Hayatabad in northern Pakistan. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS

Gul Shada thought it was the end of the road for her when she and her husband met with a road accident last year in the Nowshera district of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, one of the four provinces of Pakistan. Not only did the mishap leave Shada widowed at the relatively young age of 37, she also sustained an injury to her back that immobilised her.

It was then that she came to the country’s sole paraplegic centre (PPC) at Hayatabad, to the southwest of Peshawar, the capital of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. And it was here that she was taught that you don’t need to be on your feet to be able to stand on your own.

Along with helping her regain her physical strength, the centre also gave Shada training in sewing and embroidery. Today, she is able to earn a living of her own, enough to provide her three children with a decent education.

“I had thought I would be bedridden forever and my children would have to beg on the streets,” Shada told IPS. “But I am a shining example of how the PPC is helping its patients. I was referred for physiotherapy here after being operated on for spinal injury at the Hayatabad Medical Complex. My hopes were raised further when I was taught sewing and embroidery here and I became somewhat of an expert.”

Established by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in 1983 for those wounded in the 1979-1989 Soviet war in Afghanistan, the centre was left in the hands of the Pakistan Red Crescent (PRC) after the ICRC withdrew in 1995.

The PRC managed the centre till the reins were handed over to the current management in 2005. The provincial government of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa – which borders Afghanistan to the northwest – then made it an autonomous body governed by a board, through a 2009 Act.

The PPC, which has a staff of 110, remains the only centre of its kind in Pakistan which provides free treatment and rehabilitation to patients who have received injuries to their spine. Some 1,200 women and 800 men have benefited since 2005 under its training centre, bringing hopes to lives that have foreseen only despair.

One among them is Shaheen Begum from Khyber Agency, one of the eight tribal areas that make up the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, to the west of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. The 25-year-old fell from a wall in February last year, damaging her spine. After treatment at the local hospital, she was shifted to the PPC for physiotherapy.

“Not only did the physiotherapists give me tips on different exercises during my two-month stay here, they also helped me acquire computer skills. Now, I work as a composer from home,” Begum told IPS.

She may be confined to a wheelchair now, but that hasn’t dented Begum’s confidence.

On a follow-up visit to the PPC she told IPS that “I have only one son. I feel proud to be able to operate a computer and earn enough so that I can afford a proper education for him. Otherwise, I would have been roaming the streets of Peshawar with a begging bowl.”

She said she couldn’t thank god enough for giving her the opportunity to be able to work and earn her own living despite her misfortune.

The PPC’s chief executive officer, Syed Muhammad Ilyas, takes pride in the progress of his patients. He urges them to regain their physical strength and rather than be a burden on others, learn to help not just themselves but also their families.

“These are healthy young men and women who have become prisoners in their own bodies and have lost control over their bodily functions. One can well imagine the level of frustration and anxiety they go through,” he said.

The trap becomes worse if they are the sole breadwinners of the family, he added. This is, in fact, the case with 80 per cent of the patients who come to the PPC, while more than 90 per cent of them fall below the poverty line.

Many of the spinal cord injuries are sustained during road accidents, said Ilyas. But he added that falls from rooftops, trees or electricity poles, as well as firearm injuries, were also common. Patients at the centre are as young as 26 years old, he said, and they tend to arrive at the centre with little or no hope.

Few things are more expensive than treating and rehabilitating patients with spinal injuries. The cost of rehabilitating a patient in Europe or the United States can go up to millions of dollars. “We achieve the same with a fraction of that amount by getting patients to a stage where they can move about on a wheelchair and by imparting them different skills,” Ilyas said.

Sultana Gul, 51, says she came to the centre for physiotherapy 10 years ago, where she learned skills as a seamstress. Her house in Charsadda district now serves as a training centre for local women, helping many earn respectability and an income.

“In the past decade, I have taught these skills to at least 200 women in my neighbourhood,” Gul told IPS. “Around 10 women, who were earlier reduced to begging in the market square, are now earning their own living because we brought them here and taught them how to knit and sew. We train them for a month after which they teach the same skills to other women around them, everyone making a decent sum of money in the bargain.”

“It takes only a month to train a patient,” said Gul Pari, a trainer at Sultana Gul’s centre. They are initially hesitant to go through training, but agree once you convince them of how it can change their lives, she said. The centre trains about 80 women every year, she said, and there six trainers like her.

And that gives a whole new meaning to women’s empowerment.

Eighteen-year-old Shapla, a garment worker who survived the Apr. 24 factory collapse, lies on a hospital bed in Dhaka. Credit: Nari Uddung Kendra (the Centre for Women’s Initiative)

Last month, 18-year-old Shapla was just another one of thousands of garment workers employed in a factory in Savar, a suburb of Bangladesh’s capital Dhaka.

Today she is a handicapped survivor of one of the worst industrial accidents in history: the collapse on Apr. 24 of the massive Rana Plaza, a building housing five factories, that buried scores of workers under a wave of cement and glass.

The death toll reached 996 on Friday, though officials and families are still counting the bodies and searching for others beneath the rubble.

“I am desperate about the future,” Shapla said, echoing the sentiments of hundreds of female apparel workers like her who lost their limbs on that fateful day.

The young mother is now recovering in a hospital in Dhaka after her hand was amputated. Having survived the collapse, Shapla is considered one of “the lucky ones”, but she is loath to see the bright side, as her handicap will almost certainly prevent her from finding work.

Experts say that women, who make up 80 percent of the workforce in this country’s booming garments industry, have borne the brunt of this tragedy. According to initial reports, over 80 percent of those who lost lives and sustained injuries in the collapse were women.

“They are now socially and economically heavily disadvantaged,” said Mashud Khatun Shefali, founder and head of Nari Uddung Kendra (the Centre for Women’s Initiatives).

A leading advocate for female garment workers’ rights, Shefali says her organisation, which has lobbied for better conditions such as safe housing for workers, is now focusing on helping female survivors overcome the trauma of the accident.

Some of the workers are “so badly affected that they say they never want to work in factories again,” Shefali told IPS. “They need long-term physical and mental rehabilitation…and they need to be accepted as disabled persons by their families and society.”

A woman named Nazma Begum, whose legs have been amputated as a result of her injuries, told a local television station this week that she “worried incessantly” about how she would handle her disability, until her husband assured her of his continued support and love.

The dark side of manufacturing

Over the last decade, Bangladesh – a country of 150 million of which 49 percent live below the poverty line – has become a crucial player in the international apparel trade by providing a vast supply of cheap labour.

Bangladesh’s garment industry is now the third largest in the world after China and Vietnam, bringing in 20 billion dollars or roughly 80 percent of the country’s annual foreign exchange.

Major apparel companies based in the West and wealthy Asian countries like Japan and South Korea began shifting their production centres to Bangladesh when old manufacturing hubs like Thailand began to raise wages.

Mass-produced and bargain clothes that include such labels as Gap, Primark, HMV, Walmart, Sears and American Apparel are all manufactured here and then sold in the importing countries.

The biggest to the smallest of these factories are staffed by mostly young women hailing from rural areas, who come to the cities in the hopes of acquiring skills they have no access to in Bangladesh’s agricultural regions.

When they arrive in the city, they often live together in close quarters, sharing bathrooms and food.

Uneducated and illiterate, these women have few means by which to earn a steady income; their vulnerability makes them easy prey for manufacturers who claim that, in order to remain “competitive” on the world market, they must hire the cheapest possible workforce.

According to Shefali, young women often start off as interns, meaning they do not receive a wage but instead labour for a stipend that can be as low as a dollar per month.

Within a year, they move on to operating more sophisticated machinery and drawing a regular salary, she added.

Most women sew, wash and pack garments for roughly 30 to 40 dollars a month, working a daily average of 10 hours, seven days a week. In contrast, men tend to be hired for high-level positions, such as quality control and management.

The garment sector has been hailed as one of the country’s biggest employers, bringing a steady wage to thousands of women. But a string of tragedies has recently highlighted the hazardous nature of this work.

Last November, over 100 garment workers perished in a fire in the Tazreen Fashion Factory on the outskirts of Dhaka. Survivors of that tragedy claim they tried to escape, but were locked in by the factory managers.

Similarly, on Apr. 24, employees were threatened with dismissal if they failed to come to work, despite warnings that the eight-storey building, which only had a permit to house five floors, was unsafe. A week before the incident large cracks had begun to appear on the ceilings, prompting engineers to issue warnings that a collapse might be inevitable.

Negligence of workplace safety is just one of many labour violations women workers face. Sometimes they are forced to work 14-hour shifts in order to turn around a quick profit for the factory owners.

Still, activists point out that in a Muslim country with high poverty rates, the garment industry provided a rare opportunity for women to leave their homes and raise their status from housewives to breadwinners.

This increased economic independence enabled them to exercise more autonomy in their own lives, to choose their own husbands and enter into marriages on more equal terms.

But the Savar tragedy has dealt a hefty blow to this hard-earned status.

Sharmin Huq, a retired professor at the Dhaka University who specialises on the handicapped sector, fears that social discrimination will make life harder for women than ever before.

Those who survived the tragedy will likely lose their jobs, as their injuries will prevent them from performing at the level demanded by factory owners.

Huq told IPS that generous donations pouring in from countries like the United States and Germany to help the survivors must be channeled directly towards “the large number of (affected) female workers, to help them re-start their lives.”

This includes support for everything from acquiring artificial limbs to accessing regular counseling to deal with the trauma of the tragedy.

Maasai villagers in traditional clothing and jewellery in the Serengeti National Park, Tanzania. Credit: William Warby/cc by 2.0

The Maasai tribe of Kenya and Tanzania has long been a beacon of traditional culture to many Africans – and for Westerners on safari through Maasai Mara, Samburu or Amboseli, a familiar face.

But familiarity and travels aside, the tribe faces many of the same roadblocks on the path to development as any other marginalised community around the world.

William Kikanae, community leader of his Maasai village in Maasai Mara, recently spoke with IPS in New York during the launch of an initiative to provide economic opportunities for local tribeswomen by the Spanish footwear brand Pikolinos.

“First, I know for myself that women are the most important part of the family,” Kikanae told IPS. “(But) for Maasai people, women are not important. They don’t have power like a man.”

As an Adcam director for Kenya, Kikanae works with brands overseas like Pikolinos to cultivate projects that allow the women of his community to earn money.

Through the Maasai Project, local women embroider sandals that are then sent to Spain for finishing and sold all over the world, with the proceeds going back into community development projects such as schools, clinics and housing.

“Before, the men of my community thought that I supported women to be in power more than them,” Kikanae said in regards to the Maasai Project.

“We’re not going against anyone. I can say now that even our politicians are proud of the project,” Kikanae added.

The middlemen

According to a female government officer and doctor from the Maasai tribe, who asked that her name be withheld, supporting women and propelling them to the forefront of development is a significant way to achieve change among the Maasai.

“Women cannot own livestock they look after, but if educated these things will change. All is not lost for those who did not go to school, however. If allowed by their men to trade in milk, handicrafts, they can generate income for their families,” the Kenyan officer told IPS.

Poor communities are always subject to exploitation and misrepresentation when it comes to aid, so when a tribe like the Maasai partners with an organisation abroad, it is only natural for scepticism to arise.

“I think the problem here stems from the middlemen. These are the guys who are supposed to connect the community with the ‘helpers’. These people will use the opportunity to exploit the community to realise their own ambition with very little of the help reaching the beneficiary,” the officer told IPS.

“Since education has lagged behind, the few educated individuals have used the ignorance of the majority to their own benefit. So, in a nutshell, the common villager may not be able to differentiate this.”

Homework by firelight

The women of the Maasai are hardly in denial when it comes to their lack of education. They understand that the more people are educated within their community, the fewer will fall victim to exploitation.

But old patterns persist. In many local African villages, it is a well known fact that only if a young girl is rendered useless to her family – unwilling to marry young, reluctant to perform household duties and chores, or go to the garden and dig – would she be sent off to school to study. This caused a division in opportunity and kept education inaccessible to those who desired it.

A tradition-versus-modernisation issue is still visible today.

Additionally, the lack of basic needs at home such as electricity or transportation to school greatly hinders the performance of a rural student. As the officer told IPS, “You can imagine trying to do homework by firelight or walking long distances to and from school.”

Let the women lead

From an outsider’s point of view, it may seem that the Maasai women cannot catch a break, from lack of health services – especially in regards to maternal health where many women still die during childbirth – to the spread of HIV/AIDS, a topic that most do not feel comfortable talking about.

“Men go to towns, sells cows or work, have relationships with town women and bring the virus home,” the officer said. “The women have not heard of condoms or negotiating for safe sex.”

As in other societies around the world, the spread of HIV/AIDS is directly linked to education, and when children don’t receive information on sexual health, the perpetual cycle of disease continues.

Added to these concerns is the growing problem of displacement.

“Large tracts of Maasialand are being sold by men, sometimes without the knowledge of their wives. From Kitengela to Namanga on the border this is happening. This land is being bought by other communities and before long the Maasai will be in the back of beyond in extremely hard to reach areas. The current leadership is too short-sighted to see this catastrophe in the making,” the officer added.

Asked what is needed to facilitate development among the Maasai, the officer said, “There is need to for good leadership to guide this process so that there is no exploitation.”

With education and good leadership, the obstacles that the tribe face are slowly tackled. One by one, Maasai women are more likely to reassess the needs of their entire families and surrounding community, whilst working together with local and international organisations to bring about measurable change, she said.

Nyaradzayi Gumbonzvanda, the general secretary of the global rights network World YWCA, said that further economic and social empowerment was needed to change the lives of women in Africa. Credit: Ravi Kanth Devarakonda/IPS

Nyaradzayi Gumbonzvanda, a human rights lawyer and the general secretary of the global rights network World YWCA, knows what it is like to struggle against poverty and violence: she herself comes from a poor family in Magaya village in Murewa district, which lies northeast of Zimbabwe’s capital Harare.

But Gumbonzvanda has travelled a long way from her home. And she has spent much of her life trying to change the lives of women who were not as fortunate as she was.

And now she is a candidate for the executive director position at United Nations Women – a post formerly held by Chile’s ex-president Michelle Bachelet, who resigned in March.

In an interview with IPS at her offices in Geneva, Switzerland, Gumbonzvanda said that economic growth and development have to address “opportunities for creating wealth at household level, but also structural issues such as the violence and inequality that women continue to experience almost on a daily basis.”

She applauded development on the African continent, while stressing that further economic and social empowerment was needed to change the lives of women.

“I see women going forward in various areas and sectors in all African countries, who are able to shape a new narrative. We need economic and social empowerment – it is not enough to have political empowerment,” she said.

Excerpts of the interview follow:

Q: Let us start with the growing rates of rape and domestic violence against women. How grave is this problem and is it universal?

A:  I think this is one of the biggest issues facing women and girls in the world today. I see the violence against women as a manifestation of inequalities, disempowerment and exclusion…

Social disempowerment, the fact that women are seen as second-class citizens who do not often have a voice or rights about their own bodies; the painful realities of poverty and violence against women; and child trafficking for sexual exploitative work are all burning issues that need to be addressed.

What is important is that we work on preventing violence against women, including domestic violence, violence in conflict (situations) and sexual abuse. The prevention part is critical, (and it should be) followed by robust policies in different social sectors within countries and at the international level.

Q: Over the last 30 years there have been tremendous changes in the global economy and culture – largely due to the internet and globalisation. What impact has this had on women?

A:  I think there are a couple of things that happened in the last 30 years. I was in Beijing (in 1995) for the (World) Conference on Women and I would argue that there has been real international work on the international norms to do with women and human rights that is progressively good.

We now have conventions and treaties at an international level, and even at regional level, like the Maputo Plan of Action for Women (on reproductive and sexual health rights).

Even at the normative level, we see quite a lot of work and some good progress. However, whether an economic model can address the structural issues that contribute to violence against women still needs to be resolved.

Q: Are governments doing enough to address these challenges?

A:  They are not sufficient. I think governments need to get (their) priorities right and do more when they formulate their budgets. The greatest security of any nation is when its mothers and children are secure, when there is food on the table and water nearby, when there is a functioning school and, ultimately, the possibility of getting a job. That is the most secure nation.

I would urge our governments to rethink the relationship between military expenditure and expenditure on social and basic services. Just by buying one military helicopter less, governments can build 10 schools. That is the paramount challenge for governments all over the world.

Q: While there has been renewed conflict on the African continent, there are also great successes and progress with regards to development and empowering women. What do you think still needs to be done for women on this continent?

A: This year, the African Union is celebrating its 50th anniversary and African women were quite involved in the decolonisation process. They were in the trenches looking for a new Africa – and it has happened.

We are celebrating Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, who is the first African woman to lead the African Union, and that’s good for Africa.

We see countries like Rwanda and others having (significant) number of women in decision-making (positions). And yet we have to address the issue of conflict. As long as countries remain in conflict situations, and as long as there is violence, it continues to hold us back.

The continent, from the Cape to Cairo, is a rich one and we need to look within Africa (and see) where women can be more involved in the big sectors like mining, transport, and agriculture.

Q: We see technology playing a role in developing the continent with SMSs being used to inform mothers of vaccinations for children etc. What role does it have to play in bettering the lives of Africans?

A: We see a lot of potential in Africa in mobile telephony and we see it being used in Tanzania around services for family planning or for the immunisation of kids. We have also seen the introduction of mobile (phone) banking services in Kenya and Zimbabwe, and these are powerful ways to enable and empower communities.

There is a lot of potential that can be harnessed from technology and what is critical is the infrastructure and regulatory framework, which needs to be enabled.

Q: What, in your opinion, are some of the greatest successes of African women? And what can we learn from them?

A: I think I always reached out to the women leaders from my continent.  You have to remain grounded in your identity … You (have to) embrace the totality of what is good about your own context. And that is your contribution as a global citizen … My identity is informed by the collective identity.

The immigration flow to Argentina from the Caribbean island nation is much smaller than the influx of Paraguayans, Bolivians, Peruvians and Uruguayans, who make up 80 percent of the foreign nationals who have come to this South American country since 2004.

But Dominicans stand out because of specific problems when it comes to insertion in the labour market.

Clarisa Rondó of the Association of Dominicans Living in Argentina tells IPS that the women come in search of better employment opportunities, but often fall into prostitution networks due to the difficulty in finding other work.

“Argentina is a country that takes us in, it makes us feel we are taking a step ahead,” she says. “It’s a big, generous country that offers possibilities.”

Rondó was 21 when she came here on her own in 1994. She has since married, had children, got divorced, and earned a teaching certificate in the arts.

“More women than men have always come, because men find it harder to break into the labour market,” she says. She clarifies that it is also difficult for women, but “they get involved in prostitution. Many of them are illiterate, they don’t find any other work, and they don’t have any alternative.”

The presence of Dominican women in Argentina becomes visible when the police raid places where prostitution is practiced, in Buenos Aires or in provinces like Córdoba, Misiones, La Pampa, Tierra del Fuego, Rio Negro or San Luis.

Although there are no official statistics, Rondó estimates that there are some 40,000 Dominicans living in this South American country of 40 million people. Most of them – some 15,000 – live in the capital.

Sociologist Lucía Nuñez Lodwick at the National University of San Martín explains to IPS that Dominicans, who traditionally migrated to the United States or Spain, began to come to Argentina in the mid-1990s.

Argentina’s rigid peg of the peso to the dollar in the 1990s drove the influx of immigrants from the rest of the region, who earned here in pesos and exchanged them for the same amount in dollars, to send back home as remittances, she points out.

That was one of the main reasons that Dominicans began to arrive, along with the common language – Spanish – and the demand in Argentina for people willing to do low-paid, low-skilled work – as domestics, nannies, caregivers for the elderly, hairdressers or restaurant workers, she explains.

According to a study carried out by the Ecumenical Services for the Support and Orientation of Migrants and Refugees (CAREF) and commissioned by the International Organization for Migration (IOM), thousands of Dominicans came to Argentina in the 1990s.

The study, “Migración, Prostitución y Trata de Mujeres Dominicanas en Argentina” (Migration, Prostitution and Trafficking of Dominican Women in Argentina) states that 12,000 to 15,000 immigrants from the Dominican Republic reached Argentina between 1995 and 2002.

In recent years, although the exchange rate is no longer a lure, Dominicans have continued to come. “We have been arriving for years, and some have managed to gain a good position in society,” Rondó says.

The activist explains that in some cases, the women take out a mortgage on their homes to travel, in the hope of finding a job in domestic service. But when they arrive, they find it hard to get a job, start racking up a debt with those who financed part of their journey, and end up falling into the hands of trafficking or prostitution rings, she says.

Nuñez concurs: “They come to Argentina with promises of jobs that don’t turn out to be what they had expected – work that would give them a better standard of living than they had in their country.”

Once here, they find it difficult to get any other kind of work, says the sociologist, who wrote the paper “Construyendo mapas: Cuerpos femeninos, espacio y jerarquización racial en la práctica de la prostitución en la Ciudad de Buenos Aires” on prostitution and racism in Buenos Aires.

Nuñez says that when they leave their countries in search of work abroad, women are aware that prostitution is one of the possibilities, from things they have heard about, but “many think it won’t happen to them.”

The sociologist studied the link between street prostitution and female migration in the Argentine capital, focusing on women from the Dominican Republic, who are highly visible as they are black in a country where there are so few people of African descent they only began to be counted in the 2010 census.

In her study, Nuñez says black women in Argentina are often seen as highly sexual, much more so than white or indigenous women, and this makes them more vulnerable.

One Dominican woman working as a sex worker in Buenos Aires, who was interviewed by Nuñez for her study, said “maybe they like (Dominican women) because we have big breasts.”

Another Dominican immigrant working as a street prostitute told the sociologist that “My mom didn’t want me to come here. She told me what women did when they came here, and I didn’t believe her.”

To combat this phenomenon, the Argentine authorities announced in August 2012 that people from the Dominican Republic would need visas to enter the country. And for those who already live here, the authorities simplified the legalisation process and streamlined the paperwork for gaining temporary residency for three years.

But Rondó believes that requiring visas is not a solution. The same view is shared in CAREF, where IPS spoke with Gabriela Liguori, and in the Dominican Republic Embassy in Buenos Aires. They all agree that the new visa requirement won’t solve the problem.

“This just makes things worse,” says the activist. “Because it will be difficult, but they’ll find other ways to get here on land, illegally, and then the women will be less protected and more exposed to trafficking.”

But the sources who spoke to IPS do believe it is a good idea to cut the red tape needed to regularise the situation of those who came in as tourists and are now living here without the proper documents, because temporary residency status would make it easier for them to find a job.

The programme has assistance from the Dominican consulate, Argentina’s foreign ministry, and the justice ministry’s office to rescue and support victims of trafficking.

Undocumented immigrants from the Dominican Republic were given from January to July to apply for temporary residency permits. By March, 631 permits had been granted, according to the web site of the national migrations office.

“My idea is that people who come should be able to regularise their situation, study or work, because even if some do come for prostitution, they could at least have other alternatives. But without documents, they’re forced to become sex workers,” Rondó says.

Sixteen-year-old Parul, hailing from Dhaka's Batara slum, is paid about 15 dollars a month for her work in a garment factory. Also in the picture are her younger brothers and a cousin. Credit: Naimul Haq/IPS

Worker advocacy groups here are calling on some of the most high-profile U.S.-based clothing companies to make drastic reforms to their international labour practices in the wake of the factory collapse that killed more than 420 workers in Dhaka last week.

But critics say U.S. companies appear to be “meeting” these demands with increasingly creative ways to circumvent their core recommendations, by forming their own safety initiatives that rights groups say are essentially meaningless, or pulling out altogether to avoid the risk.

“Any meaningful programme needs to be legally binding,” Liana Foxvog, communications director at the International Labor Rights Forum (ILRF), an advocacy group here, told IPS.

“It needs to pay prices sufficient for ensuring compliance and needs to include worker representation so that worker voices on what they truly need are at the table.”

The collapse of an eight-storey factory building known as Rana Plaza was initially reported to have killed more than a hundred workers. As the week progressed and a major fire broke out, that figure quadrupled, setting off a public relations storm as human rights companies scrambled to identify the companies that sourced from the factory.

U.S.-based companies The Children’s Place and Cato Fashion have both been tracked as sourcing from the factory, but companies such as JCPenney, which sells European brands manufactured at the factory, are also under pressure from activist groups.

“Deadly psychology”

As critics strengthened calls for substantive changes in business practices to prevent another Dhaka tragedy, multinational companies responded this week with a flurry of press releases and attempts at deflecting blame.

“We did not have any ongoing production at the time of the incident,” Cato said in a statement.

The Children’s Place issued a similar statement, saying “none of our apparel was in production” there at the time of the collapse.

Activist groups also point to companies’ reluctance to sign onto a binding agreement known as the Bangladesh Fire and Building Safety Agreement as a lack of commitment to worker safety.

“The clothing brands’ insatiable hunger for lower prices and faster delivery by factories cultivates this deadly psychology in Bangladesh,” the Workers Rights Consortium (WRC), an independent monitoring group, said in a statement.

According to the WRC, the agreement would obligate participating companies to “open the doors of their Bangladesh factories to independent inspection and … pay for a country-wide program of renovations and repairs to make these buildings safe.”

The agreement, negotiations over which began in December 2010, needs four companies to become binding; so far, it has only attracted two.

One of the most notable instances of a prominent company bowing out of the negotiations was GAP, Inc., which owns GAP, Old Navy, and Banana Republic, among others. The company chose instead to create their own programme in October 2012.

Yet critics say that GAP’s alternative plan is inadequate. The plan carries no provisions about paying more to factories so they can abide by safety standards, for instance, and does not involve workers or unions in oversight and implementation.

Most importantly, the plan is voluntary and has no teeth for enforcing the measures. IPS contacted GAP for comment but did not receive a response.

Walmart, one of the largest retailers in the United States, denied a connection to Rana Plaza to IPS, but had been listed on the factory website, raising questions from activists. It has taken a similar route to that of GAP.

In an e-mail from the company’s international corporate affairs office, IPS was referred to a description of the store’s 1.6-million-dollar donation after the Tazreen fire in 2012 to establish the Environment, Health and Safety Academy in Bangladesh. The Academy would give “comprehensive training” on workplace safety to apparel workers.

Walmart also pointed IPS to a press release about the company’s “strengthening” of fire safety regulations in January 2012 in its factories.

Those regulations include “conducting regular fire drills, ensuring adequate number of exit routes and mandating fire safety training to all levels of factory management”, which critics say underscore a weak and inadequate commitment.

All a game

Missing from both GAP’s and Walmart’s plans is any mention of higher pay to suppliers to pay for safer buildings, which some critics say would be the first line of response if the companies were genuinely committed to the safety of their workers.

This is all just part of a “game” these companies play, Scott Nova, executive director of the Workers Rights Consortium, told IPS.

“These companies recognise they have to claim they’re doing something in order to avoid damage to the image of the brand, but they don’t want to have to do anything,” he said.

“So what we see are token donations and empty promises that can’t be enforced. They weather the public relations crisis and expect [the media spotlight] to fade.”