Gender Equality and Returns (GEAR), designed by IFC, is delivered as a joint initiative of the IFC and the ILO as part of Better Work’s training and advisory services. GEAR aims to promote career progression opportunities for women working in Better Work partner factories. By building capacity on soft skills and technical skills, GEAR supports participants’ professional advancement into supervisory roles, contributes to increased line-level productivity and develops leadership capabilities for leading and managing the workforce. GEAR creates an enabling environment by increasing factory management’s understanding of how to select, promote, support, and retain female talent. The initiative also helps enterprises to improve working conditions for women, including promoting equal opportunities, enhancing women’s leadership capabilities, social and economic empowerment, and decision-making abilities both at the household and enterprise level.
Reimagining Industry to Support Equality (RISE) is a collaborative initiative supporting industry to advance equality for women workers in global garment supply chains.
RISE brings together the four largest women’s empowerment programs in the apparel industry – Better Work, BSR’s HERproject, CARE International, Gap Inc. and P.A.C.E, —to build from proven approaches, scale impact and improve efficiency.
This single approach makes it easier and more efficient for industry and wider stakeholders to drive accelerated and lasting impact on gender equality.
The four founding partner organizations work with 50 of the world’s largest apparel brands and have reached over five million women workers globally. The ambition is to increase this to up to 20 million workers over the next decade.
Better Work collaborates with the Social & Labor Convergence Program (SLCP) to decrease audit duplication, facilitate data sharing across the industry and promote compliance with national laws and international standards. SLCP and Better Work believe that this way of sharing and managing data will contribute to increasing compliance and thus improving labour conditions.
As an ILO programme, Better Work assesses factories’ compliance using a Compliance Assessment Tool that is a aligned with international labour standards and national labour laws. Our goal is to optimize Step 1 of the SLCP Converged Assessment Framework (CAF) to generate actionable and credible data for the broader industry.
For further information, please visit our Better Work/SLCP FAQs on our engagement and updated FAQs on data sharing via SLCP in the context of Better Work factory services.