Vidiya Amrit Khan, Vice President of BGMEA, met with Simon Project’s delegation to discuss the project’s progress to date and to discuss potential future collaboration to improve the lives of garment workers in Bangladesh. Also present at the meeting was Miran Ali, Former Vice President of BGMEA.
Jointly funded by Associated British Foods (ABF) and the German Development Cooperation Agency (GIZ), the Simon Project is focused on gathering data to calculate the ratio of non-fatal workplace accidents in Bangladesh. At present, the project is collecting health-related data from 50 garment factories across the country. The data covers non-fatal injuries, minor health incidents and other workforce health metrics like reports that more than 200,000 workers’ health data have already been logged.
Vidiya Amrit Khan, at the meeting, reinforced BGMEA’s belief that the collected data can be leveraged beyond mere accident ratios. She stressed upon the data’s relevance to improve nutrition, healthcare access and overall well-being of female garment workers in Bangladesh who constitute a majority of the RMG workforce.
Moving beyond the 50-factory footprint, the meeting explored expanding the project to include a larger segment of the RMG industry in Bangladesh. Engaging more factories, widening data collection, deepening analytics and converting insights into actionable worker-health interventions are the focus areas of the project.
This is in line with BGMEA’s larger sustainability goal, which places an increasing emphasis on industrial safety, gender parity and worker health in light of the industry’s increased worldwide attention. The association asserts that providing improved social protection for RMG employees requires cooperation with research organisations and development partners.
