ICTI Care partnered with BSR to design and implement women’s empowerment strategies and support at toy factories.
The partnership forms a broader collaboration in which ICTI Care will work with other leading responsible sourcing programs, including the Business Social Compliance Initiative (BSCI), Electronic Industry Citizenship Coalition (EICC), The Floriculture Sustainability Initiative (FSI), The Sustainable Trade Initiative (IDH), and Sedex to make women’s empowerment central to the strategies, guidelines, and practices to provide a global framework for supply chain management.
s well as identifying opportunities to further strengthen ICTI CARE Certification to empower women, ICTI CARE will also work with BSR to design and implement women’s empowerment strategies and support at toy factories in India – in partnership with local toy industry associations – to foster deeper change in the country.
From preserving women’s health rights to protecting against harassment, ensuring equal pay to promoting professional advancement, learning from in-factory work in India will be applied across the wider ICTI CARE program as part of work beyond audit to build capability and empower workers.
BSR is holding consultation workshops with gender experts and companies on gender code guidance in New York and The Hague toward the end of 2016. Work to develop new and strengthened ICTI CARE criteria for women’s empowerment, as well as in-factory support and training to empower women in at Indian toy factories, will start in 2017.
ICTI CARE’s collaboration with BSR is part of a broader three-year project focusing on mobilizing private-sector action for women’s empowerment funded by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Netherlands (MINBUZA).
