Catering for women and children

Empowering women is an important part of KappAhl’s operations, both in our production countries and in our sales markets.

Many of the women who make our garments are mothers and childcare is an important issue for all parents of small children.

Under Bangladeshi labour law factories must provide childcare, but many only have a room with toys and beds but no staff. We want to change that!

During last year we started a project to help factories where we have production to get efficient day nurseries.

“To date we have helped two factories and now we are working with a third. Two thirds of the factories KappAhl works with already offer childcare. Our goal is that all factories that KappAhl works with in Bangladesh will have it and now we are helping the ones that have no day care,” relates Masuma Roushan, Social Compliance Officer at KappAhl in Bangladesh.

Normally children in Bangladesh are looked after by grandparents or neighbours when their parents are working, or else the mothers stop working when they have children.

With a day nursery at the workplace the mothers have the opportunity to take their children with them to the workplace.

“Each day nursery has about ten children. In addition relatives take babies to the day nursery every day so that they can be breast fed by their mothers during the working day,” relates Rafia Sultana, Social Compliance Team Leader at KappAhl in Bangladesh.

The response from both mothers and factories has been very good.

“The mothers have welcomed this initiative and more mothers are now leaving their children at the day nurseries,” says Masuma.

“We can also see that management and supervisors at many factories are beginning to see the benefit in the factory’s productivity and in that they can retain their good employees even when they have children,” adds Rafia.

Why does KappAhl involve itself in such a matter?

The reply is immediate;

“It is a human right to take care of your family and your children!” states Rafia.

“In addition we want to empower the mothers and give them the chance to continue working even if they have small children. Hopefully this will lead to more women becoming supervisors, which is not so common in Bangladesh today,” explains Masuma.