Postcards from the Hallways: Garment Sector Growth in Vietnam

PRODUCTIVITY GROWTH

Vietnam’s garment sector employs 2.5 million people, 81 percent of them women. Through partnership in the ILO–IFC Better Work program, IFC helps provide labor assessments, training, and advisory services to improve labor conditions in 392 factories, covering 517,000 workers that supply major global apparel brands like Nike, Gap, H&M, and others.

Better Work brings diverse groups together—governments, global brands, factory owners, and unions and workers—to improve working conditions in the garment industry and make the sector more competitive. Independent research by Tufts University shows the program’s training for factory-line supervisors yields measurable increases in productivity.

Complementing these efforts, in Vietnam IFC is also:

• Fulfilling apparel factories’ short-term capital needs and providing incentives for them to improve their sustainability performance by providing $270 million in cumulative post-shipment financing.
• Enabling 30 Vietnamese factories to lower their operating costs while contributing to the country’s green-growth targets by providing energy and water-efficiency assessments.

Read more: betterwork.org | #6DecadesOfExperience