As part of our celebration of International Women’s Day, PVH Corp. is excited to announce a major milestone for our Forward Fashion Empower Women target. We will be launching our five-year $5 million USD Project Thrive partnership with the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). The partnership aims to reach over 100,000 women and other marginalized individuals by expanding the Gap Inc. Personal Advancement & Career Enhancement (P.A.C.E.) factory program, implementing career enhancement trainings and launching P.A.C.E. in communities surrounding our supply chain.
Our USAID partnership will help PVH accelerate our Empower Women target of reaching 500,000 women across our supply chain by 2030 with professional and life skills development programs and services. The collaboration also helps us work toward providing a better enabling environment for female garment workers and surrounding communities in Bangladesh.
A hybrid in person/virtual launch event will be held on March 10 in Dhaka, Bangladesh organized by USAID and our implementation partner CARE Bangladesh. Government of Bangladesh Secretary of Ministry of Labor and Employment, Mr. Md. Ehsan-E-Elahi, will provide a keynote address. Other speakers include PVH Corporate Responsibility Manager, Bushra Baten, USAID Mission Director, Ms. Kathryn D Stevens, and Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association (BGMEA) Director, Barrister Shehrin Salam Oishee.
“I’m looking forward to seeing the excitement among the suppliers when they get to know the launch of Project Thrive on such a large scale. I believe this project will improve the lives of female workers in the Bangladesh garment industry by providing them with professional and life skills, and development trainings,” Baten said. “As a result, we will be able to contribute to the development of underprivileged women and help establish gender equity and economic resilience in Bangladesh.”
PVH will work in a phased approach over five years to engage our suppliers on imbedding the P.A.C.E. program into factory management systems, teaching on-staff trainers and layering career enhancement programs to help women advance in the workplace. This program helps remove barriers for female supply chain workers to advance professionally in alignment with the #BreakingTheBias theme of this year’s International Women’s Day and our Inclusion and Diversity commitment of achieving gender parity in leadership for our female employees.
To date we have reached over 11,000 women through the women’s empowerment programs in our supply chain and look forward to continue growing our programs and positively impact more women. The P.A.C.E. program was launched in 2019 in South Asia in India, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh. Since then, we have expanded our program to Ethiopia and Kenya and are planning to scale into Turkey, Tunisia, Egypt, and Vietnam in 2022.
We look forward to sharing further updates and milestones as we continue to advance our efforts to Empower Women across our value chain. Learn more about Project Thrive from USAID here. Visit pvh.com/responsibility to learn more about our Forward Fashion strategy.